


honey you’re familiar (like my mirror years ago)

by somniatoressinespe



Category: Runaways (Comics), Runaways (TV 2017)
Genre: F/F, You Have Been Warned, and jealous nico makes the world spin, and there's some juliexkarolina, as always voice of reason gert, but since were all about equality theres jealous karolina too, enjoy, it's angsty, messy exes au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-28
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:53:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 34,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22942084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somniatoressinespe/pseuds/somniatoressinespe
Summary: “Never thought I'd ever see you smoke,” a voice she knows all too well comes from behind her.“I live to disappoint,” she says before she can think better of it.And the problem is she doesn’t know what else to say beyond that, because the voice in question- the one that had haunted her since… well, since- belonged to Nico Minoru, and Karolina has never known once in her life how to act around her.And that’s a lie.or "karolina doesnt know how to stop loving nico"
Relationships: Karolina Dean/Nico Minoru
Comments: 29
Kudos: 243





	honey you’re familiar (like my mirror years ago)

**Author's Note:**

> how long does it have to be before it stops being a one-shot and starts being me too lazy to put it into chapters? the answer is under 35k. 
> 
> for now.

Karolina finds herself groaning as she moves her shoulders up and down, trying to get some feeling back into her sore muscles. 

Whoever told her that cross country would have been a good activity to spice up her college application clearly hadn't weighted the deal against the soreness she would feel after each practice. Tyrone claps her on her back as she passes him by, and she smiles with the few muscles that don’t ache.

She watches her teammates filter out of the locker room chatting, leaving her alone in the room with a few goodbyes thrown over their shoulders. She does her best to wave them back, her arms burning from the strange stretches coach kept making them do.

She shakes her hair out of her ponytail, almost groaning again in relief when her sweaty forehead makes contact with the cold, cold metal of her locker. It was truly a pain to start training again after summer break. Karolina could literally _hear_ all of her muscles screaming in pain. 

Fucking fartleks- they had no business being so fucking painful with a name like that.

She shrugs off her t-shirt, throwing into her bag and ignoring the splat noise it made falling inside it. Future Karolina can deal with the grossness of her uniform, Now Karolina just wants to get into the shower and never, ever have to come out again.

Just like high school.

Ah.

She shakes her head. Gert would kill her for that one.

“Well, if this is the new uniform I think there’s going to be a lot of turn up at your next race.”

Karolina’s pretty sure she just jumped so high she entered the Guinness’ world record no sweat. “Jesus Christ.”

“I prefer Julie,” the voice quips and Karolina rolls her eyes, bending down to look for a towel. She’s _so_ not going to give her the satisfaction.

“What are you doing here?” she asks as she hears Julie plop down on one of the metal benches, and when she risks a glance back, Julie’s eyes are already trained on her. She fights off a blush when she sees Julie’s lips curl into an appreciative smirk.

“Practice ended early, figured I’d pop by.”

“Cute,” Karolina huffs, straightening up, towel in hand, “But I know you’re the one who decides when practice ends.”

Julie’s lips curl into an almost real smile, this time. “So maybe I saw you running and thought you looked miserable enough I could come to lift your day up.”

“Did you now?”

Julie laughs, and there’s the proper smile Karolina remembers.

“Yes.”

“And what are you going to do to accomplish that?”

Julie stands up from the bench much more gracefully than should be legally allowed, more or less sauntering towards Karolina, pushing a hand into her hair and kissing her before Karolina has the time to think ‘hot’.

She drops her towel, as she kisses her back and lets herself be pushed gently backwards until her back hits the row of lockers. 

(Sometimes it’s nice to not be in control.)

She moans as Julie kisses her neck, finding that little sweet spot that made Karolina see stars as she made her way down to her collarbones slowly.

“If you want me to stop, just say the word,” Julie whispers against her neck, and Karolina barely has the presence of mind to breathe out a ‘ _don’t you dare’_ before Julie resumes her ministrations. Her head hits the cold metal of the locker as she lets out another moan.

She starts moving her hands up and down Julie's hips, loving the way her hands slipped so easily over and under her cheerleading uniform that really, _really_ leaves nothing to imagination, barely making contact with her ass when Julie draws away from her neck with a gasp.

She lifts her hands off of her immediately. “What?! What's wrong?”

“We're gonna be late to Topher's party!”

It takes a second or two for Karolina's brain to reboot enough to understand what Julie is saying. “To whose party?”

“Topher?” Julie looks at her and only continues when she realizes Karolina's blank look is not for show, “Topher. Tall, really handsome, kinda looks like a vampire- but not the Twilight kind, more like the Shadowhunters’ type, you know? I came here to invite you but then I got… distracted.”

“I have no idea who or what that is.”

“How are you so _popular_?” Julie shakes her head with a laugh, poking her chest.

Karolina tries not to frown. 

It’s kind of a throw for her to hear Julie say that, because in high school… let’s just say she didn’t do so well in high school popularity-wise. She thinks of lightbulbs pouring down from her locker, and yes. Not well is an understatement.

“I honestly don’t know,” she laughs it off too, shaking past scars out of the way, “Pretty white person privilege?”

“That must be it. Now come on, we're already late.”

“Do we have to?” she whines, pouting when Julie breaks even more away from her. She curls one of her fingers in the hem of her black and red top, trying to keep her close, but Julie evades her hands smoothly.

“Yes, it’s on our hook up contract. Right after no vegan ice cream in bed.”

“That thing is delicious, and you know it,” Karolina says, inching closer to the other girl while pouting slightly, “Besides I’m more interesting than some stupid party.”

“Disgusting is what it is, Dean. And it's not gonna work. C’ mon, put on something else other than your sweaty uniform and let’s go.”

“Damn,” she drawls the word out, putting on a ridiculous southern accent that makes Julie laugh- the sound doesn’t quite make butterflies fly in Karolina’s stomach like it’s supposed to, but she thinks she’s getting there- “Do we really have to?”

“Yes.”

She bends down to pick her towel back up with an overexaggerated huff, before fake grumbling the whole way to the showers. Julie laughs again, and Karolina smiles.

“Julie?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t lie to yourself. We both know you like my sweaty uniform,” she winks, before slowly sauntering away, hips swaying with each step. 

The last thing she sees is Julie’s eyes tracking her movements and checking out her ass in the sinfully short, mandatory spandex shorts. She smirks as she strips down and hits the showers. 

Still got it.

**

With some more persuasion from Julie’s side, they do manage to make their way to Topher’s house, Karolina rubbing her feet the whole way. She manages to steal three kisses on the threshold before Julie pushes her away and knocks on the door with a fake annoyed huff.

As soon as they're inside, Karolina makes a beeline for the kitchen, taking two red cups from the counter, filling one with water and the other with the ice-cold cheap beer left in the cooler by the table, handing the second to Julie with a bow and keeping the first for her.

Julie rolls her eyes but takes it with a smile before disappearing into the crowd, Karolina treading after her.

Karolina had mastered over the years the art of not drinking at frat parties. Always take a red cup, never finish it or let anyone get you a refill, never let anyone take a sip lest they put in their head the idea you must catch up with them.

She grasps the cup in her hands like a lifeline, as she dodges dancing people and drunken make outs on the dancefloor. She shakes her head and tries to keep up with Julie, who walks around the house like she was born to navigate party crowds in her sleep. 

By the time she emerges from the sweaty crowd, Julie had already found all of her friends, who had by some miracle managed to reclaim one whole couch all for themselves. She ends up sandwiched between Julie and one of the other cheerleaders- Brandon or something- who keeps elbowing her in the arm and making her spill water in her lap.

She manages a full half an hour before she has to take a break from the stuffy seat and air, pecking Julie’s cheek in apology before slipping outside. She searches for her pack of cigs- or her cancer sticks, as Gert likes to call them- and lights one up. 

Her fingers steady as she takes the first drag.

She doesn’t smoke much, not during the season anyway, and certainly not in the way some of Julie’s friends do. She barely finishes a pack a month, it’s only ever so often she lets herself indulge in one.

It’s no coincidence, though, that she mostly indulges herself when she’s out at parties with too many people crammed into one space. In any case, she likes to believe she could quit whenever she wanted.

She sighs and closes her eyes, enjoying the way the night air cooled her skin.

“Never thought I'd ever see you smoke,” a voice she knows all too well comes from behind her, almost startling the cigarette right off her mouth.

“I live to disappoint,” she says before she can think better of it.

And the problem is she doesn’t know what else to say beyond that, because the voice in question- the one that had haunted her since… well, since- belonged to Nico Minoru, and Karolina has never known once in her life how to act around her. 

And that’s a lie. 

Because there was a time where Nico was the only one she knew how to live around, but that wasn’t a time Karolina wanted to remember. And sometimes it felt like it never happened at all, anyway.

Next to her, Karolina felt too quiet and too loud at the same time, too little and too much, because Nico always felt like something special and Karolina always knew what _that_ had entitled in the long run.

Maybe that’s why as they were growing, they grew apart. Maybe that’s why they don’t really talk anymore.

Another lie. 

(Karolina knows all too well why.)

It seems easy, though, to explain it all away like this.

They were friends because their parents ran an organization together. Then they grew up and they all went their separate ways, more or less. It was a simple story, really. If you ignored that summer in which Karolina and Nico had…

Anyway. 

She doesn’t know _how_ to start a conversation with Nico, so she opts to stay silent, quietly offering one of her cigarettes.

Nico takes it without a word, but her lips do that weird twitch upwards that might classify as a smile under the right light- and it's cute, really cute. She stops the thought in its tracks before it jumps to some other ridiculous one, like how Nico's lips look really soft.

She flicks the lighter open again, hands cupping the flame carefully. Nico steps closer, lightening the cigarette and lingering there, eyes still trained on Karolina. She doesn’t want to think about why they are.

“Great party,” she says in the end, her voice coming out much too hoarse- like she was gasping for air, like just Nico’s proximity had made her breathless and wanting- and when their closeness becomes too much to bear, taking a step back.

Nico only puffs a small spiral of smoke in answer.

Karolina regards her for a moment.

She's wearing a plain-looking black dress- or as plain as Nico's goth next door look can allow it to be- and it's something Karolina wouldn’t have taken a second glance at, were it not Nico the one wearing it.

Her eyes linger on the short hem of the dress- and how someone as short as Nico can pull off the legs for days thing, she doesn’t know, but it works perfectly each time.

Her eyes snap back to Nico's face and the trickle of smoke escaping her lips.

She finds herself wondering how her lips would taste if she were to kiss Nico right now. 

Probably of wax and smoke and whatever kind of strong alcohol Nico looked like the type to drink, something brown and rich, something like whiskey or bourbon… and there Karolina goes again, making assumption of someone she now barely knows, someone she has always barely known.

“How do you know Topher?” she tries again, an attempt to keep from running away from Nico's slowly raising eyebrows and pretty lipstick clad mouth.

“We dated a while back.”

“Oh.”

“What?”

“I just thought you were going out with Chase is all.”

“What?” Nico repeats, this time hysteria lingering around her eyes- or maybe it's disgust in which case, same.

And, really, Chase is not a bad guy at all, it just happens to be that Karolina is a giant lesbian and he used to have this tragic- and more than a little pretend if you ask her- crush on her for a very long time. Safe to say, it didn’t end well for him, for as gracefully as he took her no.

“Yeah,” Karolina continues, because once she's started this weird stunted conversation with Nico in between puffs of white smoke, she doesn’t know how to stop, “I don’t know. Gert thought so, anyway.”

She doesn’t even try to explain why. 

She's pretty sure there's no need. She's pretty sure anybody with eyes could see Gert's gigantic and not at all recent crush on Chase- anybody except the boy-man himself, of course.

Nico just laughs, as if the thought alone of being with Chase was so completely ridiculous on its own it doesn’t even need a dispute. And it feels weird and it feels right to still be able to understand her after three years.

“In her defence, you're always together.”

There’s little tears forming around Nico’s eyes, her eyes crinkling, and it makes Karolina want to join in. “How heteronormative of hers.”

“That’s what I said!”

“No,” Nico gasps out once her laughter has stopped coming in fits, “We're not together. We kissed once if you want to be technical about it, but it was way, _way_ too weird.”

Karolina hums- because being kissed by Chase Stein was an experience, really- taking one last drag of her cigarette before crushing it against the heel of her boots and flicking the butt in one of the trash cans. 

She's about to step inside, thinking the stunted and more than a little awkward conversation over when Nico's voice stops her in her tracks. “What about you?”

She turns back to her with a quizzing smile, her best unassuming smile, the one that made people relax their shoulders and smile easily back. On Nico, it doesn’t work. 

“ _What_ about me?”

“Were you also worried about Chase’s single status?”

Karolina raises an eyebrow because Nico already knew the answer to her question. Karolina's not sure if she’s trying to be cruel about it, though, or if she really had not cared at all, after all. She doesn’t know which is worse.

Karolina watches the fire consume the cigarette in Nico's hand, paper turning slowly from white to brown to black to ashes. The smoke rising in lazy spirals into the sky, and with every exhale some more joined the slow stream in its journey towards the heavens. 

She kind of felt like that at the moment, caught under Nico's stare as the light in her chest flickers and flickers until it smothers.

“No,” she answers her in the end, so quietly she thinks Nico may as well not hear her, not that it’d mattered if she didn’t, “Not Chase’s.”

The cigarette in Nico's hand flies down to the ground, breathing out one last spiral of smoke before Nico's heavy heel comes down to crush it. Karolina swallows, shivers breaking through her skin.

“Yeah, didn’t think so,” Nico whispers, too, and it feels like a knife being twisted in her gut- and yes, definitely cruel, then.

And Karolina remembers, all at once and despite her will, what had connected their lives together in another time, in what feels like another world, beyond small colleges and shared friends and friendly parents. Remembers a conversation on a roof on a night like this, avoiding a party like this.

Or maybe remembers is the wrong word, because it was always present, hanging between them, and the two of them pretending to not have shared anything at all in the first place.

And she hates the way her heart jolts at the memory of it all, at the memory of Nico.

(She doesn’t think she could ever hate _her_ , though. And she hated that, too.)

Nico brushes close to her while she steps inside, and Karolina feels almost desperate in her want to keep her there with her for a little longer. Which is stupid, so she grabs her pack for another cigarette, switching one craving for another- she's not really sure which will kill her faster, but she's putting her money on Nico.

“You want another?” she can't help but asks, though, gesturing to the pack she's already putting back in her jacket's pocket. 

And she hates the fact she asked, and she hates the fact she had wanted to ask in the first place, and she hated the fact she had never learnt how to say goodbye to Nico. 

Or maybe it wasn’t the fact she never learnt how to, maybe it was how she thought she would never _have_ to learn how to say goodbye to Nico. And then she had to.

“Nah, thanks. I’m good. I'll see you around, Dean,” but Nico hesitates too, looking at her with a weird spark in her eyes before sliding back into Topher’s house.

And it feels like a promise.

(She hates the fact that she’s happy it feels like a promise, too.)

(Mostly, she thinks, she hates the way she never could hate _her_.)

“See ya,” she manages to choke out, before tearing her eyes away from Nico’s retreating from. 

Bad, Karolina.

She slumps against the wall, shaking her head and breathing in a large drag of her cigarette, enjoying the burn tickling her throat.

Truly, truly terrible, Karolina.

By the time she gets back to Julie, she had smoked one more cigarette from her pack, and she probably smells like it- like cigarettes and cool night breeze and past heartaches. 

Julie doesn’t seem to mind, wrapping her arm around her almost subconsciously as soon as she gets close enough. “Where did you disappear to?”

“Outside.”

“Yeah, I can smell it,” Julie’s nose crinkles adorably, “You stink.”

Karolina lets out a small laugh- it comes out condescending and nervous and everything Karolina never wants to be. She cringes. “And what are you gonna do ‘bout it?”

“Not kiss you, for one,” Julie says, shoving her half-heartedly away, and Karolina finds herself laughing- for real this time, and without a care- sour mood forgotten in Julie’s light banter.

“Rude.”

She tries to slip back under Julie’s arm, lips puckering jokingly, when she makes eye contact with Nico across the room. She stops abruptly, feeling much too close to Julie all of the sudden. She ignores her every instinct to jump away, to run outside again, and curls back into Julies embrace.

(It still feels something akin to performing.)

Julie tightens her arm around her and smiles her sweet smile, the one that usually makes Karolina’s lips curl back, but that just makes her stomach turn now. 

(Julie didn't deserve performing.) 

Julie stares at her for what feels forever, before nudging her gently. “What is it? Do you want to go?”

“Uh?”

“You seem distracted.”

“It's nothing much, don’t worry.”

Julie makes a weird face at that, so Karolina kisses her cheek softly in apology. She knows she’s not much of a company at parties like these, but her anxiety isn’t kind on her in instances like these- which isn’t a justification, she knows, but she’s trying.

She’s maybe, possibly, also in a frenzy over seeing Nico after God knows how long- three years and four months, but who knows, really- but Julie doesn’t need to know that. Hell, Karolina doesn’t want to know that.

**

 _They’re not together_ , she texts Gert when she finally crashes back into her own bed, before throwing her phone on the nightstand and finally closing her eyes.

**

She doesn’t dream.

**

The next morning, Karolina doesn’t expect to wake up in her bed with a splitting headache, let alone to a buzzing phone she forgot to put on silent last night. She turns, fighting with her covers and blindly reaching for her phone on the nightstand. 

If Gert thinks it’s acceptable to text her this early to scream about something or another that Chase Stein did, she might quit her job as her best friend.

(Were they even best friends? Karolina thought of her that way, yes, and Gert certainly was one of her oldest friends. But Gert also had Molly.)

(People always ended up having someone other than Karolina.)

She hears Nevaeh grumble in her sleep and the sound of shifting sheets. She groans softly.

She groans again when her hand keeps failing to meet her phone- who’s now silent, the bastard- lifting herself up on her forearms before finally locating it laying under one of her psych books, right beside a post-it with a heart scribbled on it. 

She barely has the time to smile about it, when she notices the unknown number flashing on her phone’s screen.

It’s not Gert. 

It’s the opposite of Gert. 

It’s Nico.

She frowns down at it, blinking repeatedly in an effort to wash the sleep off of her eyes that made her see things that weren’t in the realm of possibilities. When that doesn’t work, she opens the text who really had no business existing in her phone.

 _hey, its nico,_ the text reads, _hope u dont mind I got ur numbr off chase._

Karolina squints and reads it all again, but the message doesn't change.She wonders what are the probabilities that this was all a headache induced hallucination.

Hope you don't mind, the message reads, and Karolina doesn't know what to do with that.

Because Karolina sort of minds. 

She sort of minds a lot. 

But it’s been three years and she should really be over it- really be over _her_ \- so she answers with an ‘ _of course not_ ’ and a smiley face she hopes doesn’t come off as too passive-aggressive. 

(A small lie.)

**Nico (11.21):** _for a sec i thought youd just leave me on read frver_

And it’s absurd the mere motion of Karolina ever ignoring Nico because she could never be indifferent to her. No matter how angry she still is at Nico. She could _think_ about doing it, of course, but never actually do it.

**Karolina (11.21):** _I’d never do that._

**Nico (11.23):** _yeah u r way too ncie still._

**Nico (11.23):** _was wonderin if u wanted to hang l8ter._

Karolina has to blink twice at her phone to actually believe what’s she’s seeing- she doesn’t know whether to focus on the fact Nico still texts like it’s 2008 or on the fact that she apparently wants to ‘hang’. 

She wonders, for a second, if Nico was still drunk from yesterday. 

She wonders, for that same second, if someone had slipped alcohol in her cup, too, because she’s actually considering answering yes. Her phone buzzes in her hands again, and nope, not drunk, not a dream.

**Nico (11.25):** _u there?_

**Karolina (11.27):** _sorry I'm a bit hungover_

(A bigger lie. She hadn't been drunk, last night. A little bit on Nico, though.)

**Karolina (11.27):** _where do you want to meet?_

**Nico (11.27):** _dw ill come pick u up_

Karolina should also probably be worried, or at least weirded out, that Nico knows where she lives. Then again, she probably knows because of Chase. Or Gert. Or Molly. 

(No, she should definitely be weirded out by this.)

She stretches off the bed, cracking her back in all the right places. 

Nevaeh grumbles again, this time a more awake one. Karolina almost feels bad, until she remembers that time Nevaeh had woken her the morning after a meet.

She should probably shower before Nico came around. 

They may have grown up together- and actually seen each other naked, even if that’s another story- but making her wait in her small dorm room with her roommate while she showered was probably still not good etiquette.

Though her efforts seemed to be for nothing, because when she comes back from the showers hair still slightly wet, she finds Nico already in her room, chatting with Nevaeh.

“Hey.”

“Hi,” Karolina greets back, and if her face is slightly flushed, that too is because of the shower and for no other reason.

Obviously.

“I believe that’s my cue,” Nevaeh says, picking her bag from her desk, “It was nice meeting you, Nico.”

“You too.”

Nevaeh makes an okay sign and winks at Karolina, and now she’s really flushed.

“Breakfast?” Nico asks when they’re the only one left in the room, as if it’s something they had done since forever, as if this isn’t the first time they’ve hung solo since… well, since.

It’s sending Karolina a bit, if she’s being truthful, watching Nico stand inside her dorm as if she belonged there, in between Karolina’s posters and photos.

Karolina smiles and nods. Hopes that her face is not betraying how anxious she feels at the prospect of alone time with Nico. “I can do that.”

“Good. You’re driving.”

“I thought you were the one picking me up?” Karolina can’t help but tease, falling seamlessly into the weird mix of familiarity and alienation that comes from having grown and not grown up with Nico Minoru. 

(They had missed so much of each other lives, yet Karolina feels like she knew Nico on a molecular level still.)

(She hates that a bit.)

“I am here, aren’t I?”

And Karolina can’t argue against that. Even if Karolina didn’t understand why, but she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t curious about it, so she takes the keys to her car and drives Nico to her favourite place for brunch.

“This is weird, right?” Karolina says as they sit down in their booth. Because it is, and it isn’t, and Karolina doesn’t know what to think anymore. She’s so tired of not knowing where they stand.

Nico frowns, her face mostly buried in the menu and hidden from Karolina’s view apart from her furrowed forehead. “Is it? We all used to be friends. I still meet up with Gert, sometimes.”

The two of them used to be more, too, Karolina wants to say, but they also used to be less, so she stays quiet.

She wonders for how long they can pretend before everything explodes around them.

“We were friends because our parents were- are,” Karolina tells her in the end, in the same fashion she had been telling herself for years now.

(They were thrown together by circumstances. No wonder those same circumstances had pulled them apart, too.)

Nico looks up from behind the menu, face carefully blank but her eyes focused on Karolina. “And you moved on from that?”

 _Yes_ , she wants to say, _I have._

But she _is_ sitting in a booth with Nico Minoru, eating breakfast, so maybe she hadn’t moved on- not that much, and certainly not enough.

“Have you?”

“I thought I did,” Nico says, and there’s something off about her smile, something Karolina can’t quite place, but it’s gone as soon as she notices it, “But I’m here.”

“Well, if we’re being fair, so am I.”

Nico laughs, and Karolina hadn’t meant it to be a joke, but she knows what they say about gift horses, so she laughs along with her.

So, they eat breakfast and catch up.

She finds herself looking at Nico, cataloguing all of the differences that she couldn’t look for last night under the moonless sky. Nico was the kind of good looking that Karolina couldn’t ignore, had never been able to ignore. Only good looking felt reductive, now.

She’s still shorter than Karolina, that much had been obvious even last night- no late grow spurt, then- but she did wear taller boots now than she did at sixteen, even if her clothes had toned down quite a bit from their full goth potential to this new type of punk rock that makes Karolina’s mouth water, nonetheless.

Her hair had been cut shorter, to her chin, the tips curling and twisting at the end and Karolina desperately wants to slip a hand through them to see if they really were as soft as they looked.

Her face is still kinda round, but her chin is sharper, as is her jaw, as are her high cheekbones, no more baby fat to hinder her amazing bone structure- and yes, Karolina may be being too much of a lesbian right now to make much sense.

She looks at Nico’s eyes, and yes, those had stayed the same kind of focused obsidian Karolina remembered.

Yeah, good looking was reductive.

Nico is looking at her, too, like she was trying to put together all the ways in which Karolina had grown while she wasn’t there to witness it. Karolina doesn’t know what she’ll find- in her opinion she hadn't changed all that much since she was seventeen, and with the way her heart kept speeding up under Nico’s gaze, certainly not enough.

She looks away.

(She wants to run.)

(She doesn’t.)

“God,” Karolina sighs, because she has to distract herself with something that isn't Nico’s lips wrapped around a plastic straw, because existing near Nico again still didn’t feel real enough, “I really don’t want to go to class.”

And Karolina had mostly forgotten, and mostly done so on purpose, the reasons why she liked spending time with Nico so much- apart from the fact she used to be more than half in love with her.

She had been too caught up in the memories of how Nico sometimes had made her feel put together in all kind of wrongs to remember- because Nico had liked cult movies, and punk bands Karolina had never heard of before, and boys. 

(And Karolina had not.)

But Karolina does remember now- it was because Nico was smart and quick-witted and honestly much too perceptive for Karolina’s own good.

“Then don’t,” Nico says, with a simplicity that frankly eludes Karolina.

“What?”

“Just don't. You're in college now,” Nico shrugs her shoulders, “You can do whatever you want.”

And it’s not that easy.

(Or is it?)

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it just doesn’t, Nico!” Karolina’s palm strikes the table with too much force, Nico lifts an eyebrow and Karolina blushes, dropping back into her seat, “I can’t just drop everything on a whim like it doesn’t matter.”

Nico flinches slightly at her words, and Karolina doesn’t realize why. Until she does, and she hadn't meant her words like Nico had taken them, but she isn't sorry for them anyway.

“It’s your life Karolina,” Nico says, looking away, and her voice is softer than Karolina deserves after her childish outburst, “You can do whatever you like.”

And it’s not true, because if it were, she’d just grab Nico’s face in her hands and kiss her until the world fell apart around them. But it’s not true, and Karolina barely suppresses a scream. 

She shakes her head. “You don’t get it.”

Nico’s smile turns sharp around the corners and Karolina has to actively resists the urge to run out of the diner and drive away at full speed. 

(To leap across the table and kiss her.)

“Is this the life you dreamt for yourself? A psych major who doesn’t like her classes?”

And it feels like a spark being ignited back into her soul, as Karolina squares her shoulders and stares back.

“It was a smart choice,” Karolina defends.

Nico doesn’t drop her smile, wields it like a knife instead. “You have to wonder if smart and good are synonyms.”

“It was the choice I made.”

“Not the one you wanted to make, though.”

“What would you know about that?” Karolina scoffs, even if she knows Nico is right.

(No, this life wasn’t exactly what Karolina had dreamt for herself, but she had stopped believing in dreams a long time ago.)

Nico sighs, mouth opening and closing twice before sighing again, as she pushes her hair back with one hand. It bounces back pretty much instantly and Karolina, in a moment of pure unfiltered lesbianism, has to remember the fact they’re kind of fighting at the moment and she shouldn’t be thinking of how cute Nico looked right then. 

“That’s different, then,” Nico breathes out, her voice sweetening.

“What?” Karolina asks, kinda thrown back by the quick change of subject, kinda grateful for it all the same.

Just as fast as it had come, the tense atmosphere evaporates into nothing, lingering only in the glances of the other few, noisy patrons sitting around them.

“You used to shrink up on yourself, the fact you shied away from any and all confrontation,” Nico trails off with a shrug, “It used to make me so mad.”

“Yeah? You were the only one who ever got me truly angry," she counters before amending, "Well, you and Gert, but with her it was different. You used to know just what to say to get under my skin.”

“We were weird kids.”

Karolina lets out a small laugh because _that_ was an understatement. She takes a sip of her kombucha.

Nico looks at her expectantly. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Didn’t you want to go to class?”

“I already lost the first ten minutes,” Karolina shrugs, a theatrical shake of her shoulders that makes her bangs bounce all over her forehead, “Might as well just stay here with you.”

Nico smiles, one of her rare, pre-tragic-goth-kid ones, and Karolina feels naked under her gaze. She takes another sip from her cup, hiding from Nico’s piercing brown eyes.

“What?”

“Nothing. I just missed you.”

“Oh,” Karolina feels her cheeks heating up under Nico’s attention.

Nico’s smile runs kind of sad, her eyes almost out of focus. “We all fell apart when you went away, you know?”

 _Went away, ran away,_ Karolina thinks, _it’s all in the semantics, isn't it?_

And honestly, that’s rich coming from Nico of all people, but Karolina’s trying to change, to let go of all the anger that had clouded the beginning of college for her. 

She wants to be better. 

“We were always falling apart. We just forgot how to fall apart together.”

Nico does that thing with her mouth, that half-smile that managed to look like a mix of prideful and fond and amused all at once. That half-smile that made Karolina feel like she was seventeen and lovestruck again.

Before Karolina can think of a way to dissolve the tension, her phone buzzes on the table and does it for her. 

Nico tilts her head towards it. “Gert?”

Karolina checks it when Nico nods again towards it like a permission. 

“No," she answers, "Just Julie.”

“That’s the girl you were with yesterday, right?” Nico says, her face unreadable- and that’s different, too, the fact Karolina can’t read her like an open book anymore.

“Yeah.”

And Karolina could probably ask her now, if she had anybody in her life too. Not that she will.

Nico’s lips curve into a smirk- or maybe she’s sneering, Karolina isn't so sure, to be honest. Nico’s smile had always been a double-edged sword. “You gonna break her heart?”

“What do you mean?”

“Words of your conquests come around,” Nico says, emphasising the letter s in conquests and smirking even more openly like she’s about to dudebro high five her for it.

(She’s immediately reminded that Nico’s best friend was Chase Stein.)

Karolina plays it coy, lifting an eyebrow in answer, and Nico concedes. 

“I’m friends with Alison.”

_Oh._

“Oh,” Karolina’s mouth falls open a little without her meaning to.

_Shit._

Running suddenly feels like a good option again.

“So?” Nico smirks, leaning conspiratorially over the table, like this wasn’t the most awkward possible conversation the two of them could have, “Gonna break this poor girl’s heart?”

“I…” she presses the heel of her hand against her thigh, “We’re just fooling around, nothing to break.”

Nico huffs a laugh as she settles back down in her seat. “So cold! I used to remember you believed in love.”

“That was before.”

 _Before Xavin,_ she doesn’t add, _before you._

Nico pretends not to understand, or maybe she really doesn’t understand, still smiling like it was all a joke, and Karolina doesn’t know which is worse, so she scrambles to change the subject.

**

They don’t talk about Alex. They don’t talk about the night on the roof. They don’t talk about the nights that had come after that. And maybe, it’s better like this way.

It’s not like talking about the past will change it, anyway.

**

Life keeps going as normal, Karolina goes to class in the mornings and to meets in the afternoons, she sees Gert at lunch, sometimes she sees Molly, too. 

Or life would go on normally if Nico didn’t keep texting her and Karolina kept texting back.

She doesn’t know why she keeps answering, not when she already knows this game she’s playing won’t end well for her.

(She knows why.)

(Nico was the light and Karolina was the month burning her wings in her flame.)

The problem was, Karolina had started to develop a bad relationship with her phone since Nico had texted that first morning. It wasn’t like she was glued to it or anything, she still managed to meditate and listen in class- most of the times- and everything, but she does start to check it too much hoping for new texts.

Karolina is dealing with it, though. It’s not like she wakes up and goes to check her phone for any message from Nico.

She doesn’t do that.

She doesn’t open her chat with Nico, wishing for three dots and instead getting nothing.

She also doesn’t wish for a profile picture, something she could stare at to remind herself how wrong of a decision it was, to allow Nico back in her life.

She doesn’t do all of that, because Karolina doesn’t care that Nico keeps texting her at odd hours, sometimes replying instantly and others disappearing for what felt like days.

She doesn’t.

The only problem was, Gert had started to notice.

The only problem was, that for some reason Karolina had still not told her that she had Nico had been… reacquainted.

(She knows the reason.)

(She wants to keep it to herself for as long as it was possible because it feels weird to even think about telling someone else. And she knows what Gert will tell her about the whole situation. And she doesn't want to hear it, yet.)

So Gert thinks she’s finally getting serious with someone for once, and Karolina doesn’t exactly do anything to correct that thought. 

Technically, she _is_ going out with Julie still. Technically. Because Julie too, keeps texting her, and Karolina keeps fucking her against cold lockers when no one was around. 

That kind of feels like a recipe for disaster to her, but she’s never been too good at baking, so, how should she know.

She unlocks her phone for the third time in ten minutes, glad her roommate wasn’t here to witness this pathetic show, barely catching the three dots flashing in sequence at the bottom of the chat before they disappeared, like a weird dance she didn’t know the name of.

Her fingers hover over the screen as the dots reappear and vanish again. She locks her phone.

She throws it on her bed, watches it bounce once, then twice, before drowning in the mess of blankets and pillows and clothes she still needs to wash. Karolina’s ashamed to say that it only takes three seconds for her determination to evaporate, flinging the clothes around before finding her phone. 

She opens Instagram, fingers tapping in the search for Nico’s name. Her profile is easy enough to find, a thumbnail of Nico’s profile glaring back at her not two seconds after typing the c. 

It’s private.

She closes the phone with a shake of her head. That’s a rabbit hole she shouldn’t fall in.

She falls back on her bed with a sigh.

What the hell was she doing?

Instagram stalking Nico would be a bad idea even if she wasn’t Karolina’s sort-of, maybe-in-another-lifetime ex-girlfriend.

(What _was_ Nico to her anyway, what had she been other than her first love, her first heartbreak?)

She thinks of the boxes piled under her bed, at the old notebooks and sketchbooks she couldn’t help but bring along with her to college, things she couldn’t bear to throw away and couldn’t bear to open at the same time, relics of what felt like another age. 

She stands up, taking one of the boxes out.

She doesn’t know what she expects when she opens it, but it certainly feels anticlimactic to just stare at old notebooks piled over each other, covers sticking to each other, some of the spiral ones missing pages here and there.

She shakes her head and looks for the sketchbook she hadn't opened since she was sixteen and had closed it last, not having even finished filling all the pages. 

She remembers the original cover colour, the bright blue that had now faded to a pale sky. She remembers what she had felt at the time, hiding everything behind night-sky-blue covers filled with footnotes and ridiculous poems from what felt like another life, witness to past dreams.

There’s a yellow flower pressed in between the pages, that Karolina had forgotten about until it had fallen down from the pages. She remembers Chase giving it to her, probably when they were sixteen and he was half in love with Gert and pretending otherwise.

(He didn’t stop doing that, either, if you asked her. Not that Gert had ever listened to her.)

She flips through the pages until she finds the picture she was looking for. There aren’t many photographs of Karolina at sixteen, apart from the ones taken by paparazzi. This was one of her favourites. She doesn’t look at it much, though.

It’s a good photo, all things considered.

Molly jumping over Chase’s back while Gert frowned at the two of them, her hair still long and brown, Karolina leaning behind them, not out of the shot but certainly on the edge of it. 

It’s a good photo, if you ignore the ache in her chest she still feels when she watches Alex’s arms wrapped around Nico, Nico leaning into him with a smile.

They were weird things like that, photographs. They stayed the same, time did not touch them. Pictures stay the same, it’s the people that change.

That’s how Gert finds her half an hour later, on the floor and looking at old faded pictures.

“Is there a reason you’re looking at old pictures of us in the dark?”

“Jesus,” Karolina’s heart jumpstart as Gert barges through her door, “What are you doing here?”

Gert laughs at her probably scared stupid face, before squatting by the open box with a frown. “We were supposed to meet at the library like twenty minutes ago.”

“Shit, Gert. I'm sorry.”

“It’s fine,” she waves it off with one hand before stopping, “Well, no, actually. It isn't. But it will be if you tell me why you’re looking at the box of memories here.”

“No reason,” she says quickly. Much too quickly. Good going, she blew it before it even started.

Gert narrows her eyes at her until they’re reduced to glaring slits of unbelief. “Sure.”

“I--”

“I take it has nothing to do with the fact you’ve been glued to your phone lately? Not today, though, of course.”

Karolina shoots a glance at her phone still lost in her unmade bed. “No.”

“Uh uh. So, it’s either Xavin…”

Karolina can’t help the grimace at their name. It still all felt like a gaping wound, like a black hole left near her soul- not near enough to be swallowed whole, but still close enough to feel the gravity of it all.

“Or it’s Nico.”

That’s another grimace- this time the black hole _had_ swallowed her whole, though.

“Nico, then,” Gert guesses right, and like, fuck. So much for not talking about the Nico situation with Gert yet. 

Great plan execution there, Karolina.

Karolina puts the picture back into the book, before closing it. “It’s not what you think.”

Gert sighs before falling dramatically on Karolina’s bed. Karolina rolls her eyes. “It never is, with you two.”

“So, library?” Karolina pleads, pouting her best pleading pout.

“So, Nico?” Gert counters without even glancing in her direction. Rude.

“We’re… friends.”

Gert scoffs, unimpressed eyes finally settling on Karolina. “Right. And you’re fine with that."

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because she’s the love of your life?”

“Gert,” she warns, because Gert’s way too close to crossing that line Karolina doesn’t want to cross.

Gert sits up and lifts a single eyebrow so high it disappears in her purple bangs. “Does that mean the no-mentioning-Nico rule is lifted?”

“There’s no-- You literally just met Julie.”

Gert cackles again, this time without any humour. “Yeah, and it’s the first same-sex beard I’ve ever seen. Effervescent.”

“Molly should have never introduced memes to you,” she muttered under her breath, then louder, “Julie, Gert.”

“Sorry, I forgot how dedicated you were to your last girlfriends.”

“They weren’t girlfriends.”

Gert makes a face that, if Karolina were to guess, probably translated into _‘that’s exactly my point’_.

“I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“Oh, darling,” Gert coos, bending her way and slightly tapping her hand on Karolina’s cheek, “You’re gonna.”

“Gert.”

“You never gave me the full story of that whole mess between you, Nico and Alex.”

Karolina throws the book in the open box with finality. “I’m done talking."

“You’re not done hurting,” Gert points out matter-of-factly- and like, true, but also, rude.

“You can’t dream the same dream twice."

“Okay, Shakespeare. Stop pretending you and Nico--”

“There’s no me and Nico.”

Gert continues like Karolina hadn't spoken at all. “Weren’t good for each other.” 

“How would you know?” Karolina can’t help the words escaping her lips, “You didn't even notice we were something in the first place. Nobody did.”

“Well, you didn’t exactly shout it from rooftops.”

“Gert.”

She watches as Gert straightens, all pretence of teasing falling from her like raindrops. “You’ve started looking happier lately.”

And there’s a weight settling in Karolina’s guts with each word. Her eyelids start to burn familiarly. She shakes her head. “I’m happy.”

“No. You were… content,” Gert settles on, still softly, “But lately you’ve been happy.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Maybe so. But you’re still happier,” Gert claps her hands together, finally standing up from the bed, “So, library?”

“It’s late. How about I treat you to dinner?”

Gert gasps, putting a hand on her chest and doing the impression of a 1920’s girl swooning. “Oh my. A date with the Karolina Dean.”

“Or you can pay,” Karolina quips, standing up and pocketing her wallet and keys.

“Or I can not do that. C’ mon, I wanted to try that new Thai place, Molly told me it was good.”

She shows the box back under her bed, not wanting for poor Nevaeh to come back and promptly trip over Karolina’s box of secrets, and follows Gert out.

And Karolina doesn’t tell Gert how she’s been drawing again for the first time since high school, she doesn’t tell her they’re mostly drawings of Nico, she doesn’t tell her there's half a swirling thought that told her to switch majors in her brain.

She doesn’t tell Gert any of these things, because it’s not like they matter in the long run, anyway.

(The Thai place was good, though.)

**

Karolina wakes up to a warm hand on her waist and a buzzing phone. Both of those things were becoming a regular fixture in Karolina’s life, or so it seemed.

She carefully lifts Julie’s hand off her body and stretches her back as inconspicuously as she could. Julie doesn’t stir awake instantly, and Karolina considers it a victory.

She doesn’t know how to feel about the fact it’s the second time in a week she wakes up in Julie’s bed instead of her own. She doesn’t know how to feel about the fact Julie seems happier each time it happens.

It’s hard dealing with the feeling of being wanted, Karolina hadn't expected that when she first got with Xavin. It’s almost as hard as dealing with being unwanted had felt, and that was a surprise.

With Julie, it feels even harder.

But still, Karolina tries. Even if she doesn’t understand why exactly she’s trying. Julie is funny, yes, and pretty, and never asked Karolina for more than she could give her. Julie is all those things, but she’s not…

She sighs, her head bumping against the headboard. Too early to think about this.

“Since when do you paint?” Julie mumbles sleep still laced in her voice.

“Uh…”

Julie wraps herself back around Karolina’s body, her nose nuzzling the soft spot of her side. “You have a smudge of paint on your neck.”

Karolina freezes, a hand going to meet the spot immediately, as she feels the sudden and extreme _need_ to lie.

And she doesn’t understand why she does this every time. Hiding. The ugly things, mostly. The things she knows nobody in their right mind would ever want to see. 

Like that longing for high places that stemmed from the weird impulse to let herself fall down. 

Like the drawings that showed too much of old scars and not enough of the new ones. 

Like that want to kiss girls she shouldn’t want to kiss.

“Since forever,” she answers her in the end.

(It’s not a lie. It’s not a truth either.)

Julie presses her lips together. “Oh.”

“Yeah, I just didn’t have a lot of time lately. To draw.”

Julie keeps staring at her, pressed lips and honest blue eyes, and Karolina has to do something other than keep lying, or just run away. So, she rolls over Julie, laughing when she lets out an exaggerated huff, reaching for her phone on the nightstand.

She rolls back into her embrace, checking the text.

“Who’s Nico?” Julie mumbles in her hair.

“An old friend,” she frowns because that doesn’t feel quite right, “A childhood friend. We lost touch over the years, but I met her again at that party we went to.”

“Childhood like Gert?”

“Yeah,” Karolina shrugs with a smile- half a lie doesn’t make truth, but it feels like enough when Julie knows so little of the scars that litter her skin. She doesn’t want to look like that in her eyes. She wanted to be more.

“Why did you fall out of touch?”

“Because…” Karolina sighs, bone-tired, “Because sometimes the only thing left to say between two people is ‘I miss you’ and sometimes, that isn't enough.”

She answers the text and tosses the phone back on the nightstand, wincing when it bounces off of it.

“You gotta be more careful with that.”

“Yeah, probably. Is that what you want to talk about, though?” Karolina asks, before kissing Julie and pushing all thoughts of Nico out of her mind.

(She can’t pretend it works all that well.)

**

Her feet hit the blades of glass steadily, systematically, the vibrations travelling through her feet to her leg to her heart. She laughs, as she overtakes Tyrone on the hill and he curses, the sound of his own steps falling behind and behind.

Running is easy.

**

It still feels kind of weird, to have Nico in her space like this. It doesn’t feel right for her to exist in this part of Karolina’s life, in between college books, and her roommate’s posters and her own hang over the walls. 

Sometimes it feels like even Karolina doesn’t belong there, but she doesn’t know what to do with that particular thought, so she leaves it alone near all the other thoughts she doesn’t want to have about Nico.

She doesn’t know how _Nico_ feels about being back either, her back to her as she peruses the room like a museum hall dedicated to Karolina’s past. 

Karolina watches her silently as she bends over to look at the pictures lined up over her dresser. There aren’t a few, but Nico still manages to settle on the old one of them Karolina had brought back from the dead and put in a frame for all her ghosts to see.

Thankfully, Nico doesn’t say anything, just turns to her and leaning on the dresser, her black shirt draping over itself in the picture-perfect of cool and aloof that Nico always seemed to be.

“I didn’t know you played,” Nico says, nodding her head to Karolina’s pride and joy, stashed away under her desk in a case that had used to be black once upon a time, but that now was so covered in pride flag stickers and other kinds of flag stickers that it managed to look just as chaotic as Karolina’s life.

“Oh. Yeah. I picked it up when I was in…” she trails off. She shouldn’t be afraid to refer to that part of her life, or to Xavin, and she isn't. She just doesn’t want to think about it much.

(Another one of those thoughts she rarely wants to have, too.)

“Ah. Cool.”

“Wanna hear me play something?” Karolina blurts out, her cheeks flaring red the moment her brain registers the fact she had actually spoken aloud.

“Depends. What songs do you know?” Nico squints her eyes playfully, and Karolina laughs.

“No Tokyo Hotel, I’m afraid.”

“Tokyo Hotel,” Nico repeats almost in awe, “And how do you remember that?”

She shrugs her shoulders, busying herself with the opening of the case instead of Nico’s weirdly soft tone of voice. “You used to listen to them.”

“Right.”

“Anyway… I don’t know,” she shrugs again, careful not to joggle the guitar in her hands too much, still not brave enough to actually look Nico in the eye, “Mostly old rock songs, a bunch of Beatles’ ones.”

“I remember that. You used to be so obsessed with ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’.” 

Nico’s voice sounds fond, like days past coated in honey and sunshine, and it doesn’t feel enough, to just hear it, she wants to watch her, she wants to see her. She knows she won’t be coming back from that though, so she laughs and focuses back on the guitar strings.

She gives an experimental strum and frowns at the twang she receives back.

“I wouldn’t say obsessed.”

“Please, if I knew that, you had to have talked about it nonstop.”

She strums again, this time the guitar echoing in tune.

“So, what do you want to hear?”

“Surprise me.”

Karolina rolls her eyes, her fingers picking the song before her brain catches up. She shouldn’t be singing a love song to Nico. She opens her mouth. Oh God. She’s singing a love song to Nico.

She misses her cue, her throat feeling too dry all of the sudden. She shakes her head and tries again, “It's you, it's always you. If I'm ever gonna fall in love, I know it's gon' be you.”

She watches as Nico’s eyes widen and, shit. She should have chosen literally any other song.

And, well, Karolina had never been one to stop halfway.

Her fingers play without hitches, her voice never failing her as long as she didn’t look into Nico’s eyes, so she keeps staring at her fingers bending their way through the chords trying not to think why this was the first song to jump to her mind.

It’s not that slow of a song, not that long of one either, but it could have lasted a century for all Karolina knew.

“Oh,” Nico’s lips lift in the softest of smiles, “You have a beautiful voice.”

It takes a second before Nico’s compliment fully reaches her brain, and it takes a second more for the red to spread all over Karolina’s cheeks, her neck feels on fire, and her ears too. Not that Nico is faring any better.

“I, uh. Thank you?”

Nico is looking at her now like… Karolina has been kissed enough times by now- and she's not bragging, just facts- she knows how a girl looks at her when she wants to kiss her. She doesn’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse, the fact that her phone lights up just as she thought Nico was going to lean in.

“Gert?” Nico asks, and she’d almost sound hopeful to her ears if Karolina didn’t know better.

Karolina looks at her screen and almost lies. She scoots away from Nico a bit. 

“Julie.”

“Julie. Your girlfriend. Right.”

“Not my girlfriend,” Karolina can’t help but correct.

A look passes over Nico’s face, quick enough that Karolina can only notice it’s there before it’s gone. Some part of her wants it to be relief. Some part of her is very fucked up. “Still fearing commitment, Dean?”

“I just don’t know if we’re there, yet.”

“She seems taken enough,” Nico says, and this time Karolina’s almost sure there’s a tinge of jealousy, maybe, possibly, tinting her voice. She’s almost sure she maybe, possibly, shouldn’t care about that at all.

“How would you know?”

“People talk.”

“People,” Karolina repeats, helpless to stop the smile tugging at her lips.

“Chase.”

“And how would he know?”

“Gert,” they say together, their laughs joining.

Nico laughs, and the sound fills Karolina’s chest with warmth. “We really should do something about them.”

“They have to figure it out on their own.”

“I can’t stand the pining, though,” Nico says, her nose scrunching up.

Karolina looks away, busies herself with putting away the guitar.

“It’s a bit sad.”

“The pining?” Nico asks frowning.

Karolina shakes her head. “How they keep missing each other.”

Nico stays quiet for a while after that, long enough that Karolina can’t use the excuse of the guitar to not look at her anymore. And when she finally looks at Nico, her heart threatens to burst out of her chest to go live in her hand.

“Isn't it sadder how they keep waiting for each other anyway?” Nico asks, voice close enough to a whisper Karolina almost wants to pretend she doesn’t hear her.

“Wouldn’t you?”

“Wait? I don’t know. Maybe.”

Karolina has the strange feeling they’re not talking only about Gert and Chase now. She feels her throat closing in. She swallows. “We have to live for something.”

“Someone,” Nico blurts out, cheeks burning bright red almost as soon as she says it. 

Karolina does not find it cute at all. “Sorry?”

“We have to live for someone, too, I think.”

And Karolina doesn’t know how to answer that, just watches as Nico shrugs her shoulders. “I’m selfish, I guess. I don’t really care for the world.”

“I don’t think I know how to be selfish like that.”

“No,” Nico sighs, “You wouldn’t.”

Her forehead scrunches together for a second. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That you have a bleeding heart, Karolina Dean.”

“Oh,” Karolina breathes out. 

It’s not a compliment. It doesn’t _feel_ like a compliment. She knows Nico means it as such, though, because Nico’s eyes are focused on her, and Karolina’s on fire.

She swallows and Nico’s eyes track that movement, too.

“Anyway. You hungry?” Nico asks, standing up, short and to the point.

She’s not. At least not in that sense.

“Starving.”

“My treat. Anywhere you like. I have to repay you for that absolute smasher of a performance,” Nico smirks, her voice flowing like water.

Karolina blushes again as she waves her off. “It’s not--”

“Please.”

“Okay.”

Nico smiles and she smiles back, and they stay like that, smiling at each other, for long enough it feels like they’re never going to move again.

Nico seems to shrug the moment off first, opening the door for her with a flourish. “Coming?”

Karolina laughs but she doesn’t tell her she’d follow her everywhere. There wouldn’t be a reason to. She’s pretty sure Nico knows already.

**

Slowly, hanging out with Nico means getting to hang out with Chase, too. Then Victor. Then Molly and Gert join in, too, and soon Karolina’s days fill up with her childhood friends and coffee dates.

It’s almost too much.

And it’s not like Karolina had been unhappy, anyway, before her old friends had come crashing back into her life. She had friends and classmates and teammates too, more recently. 

It’s not like Karolina had been friendless, in the meantime. It’s not like Karolina had been lonely. It’s not.

(She was just used to doing most things on her own.)

(That sounded sad even in her own head.)

Anyway, in a strange case of events, Karolina now finds herself surrounded by old friends that feel like new ones, and yet she can’t help but focus entirely on Nico.

She knows why, she knows that there will always be a part of herself- that small, young and hopeful Karolina that had once looked at Nico and had seen the entirety of the night sky and the endless possibilities it brought- that’s hopelessly drawn to her. 

The problem is, there’s also a bigger part of her that looks at Nico and sees new endless possibilities with her _now_ , with this Nico that had grown and changed without her but had stayed the same girl Karolina couldn’t help but follow.

And she knows she likes Nico way too much by the way she likes her.

She likes the way Nico smells, a mix of flowers and candles and leather, the way she is larger than life in every other way but physically, the way she flicks her eyebrow upwards every time Karolina says something ridiculous enough to make her laugh- the way Karolina says it _just_ to make her laugh.

She likes the way Nico wraps her arm around her shoulders when they sit together on the couch sometimes, the way her fingers dig slightly in the soft flesh of her upper arm/bicep, the way her nails scratch thin white lines as her other hand toys with the baby hair that grows there.

She likes the way Nico looks at her like she’s something precious, something lovely, something not to be shared with anyone, and that notion in particular shouldn’t make her feel as hot and bothered as it makes her.

She likes how it feels familiar and new at the same time.

And she knows it’s getting out of hand the moment she keeps thinking about Nico’s nails digging into her thighs, Nico’s teeth sinking into her neck, Nico’s hands tugging at her hair for completely not innocent reasons.

Because she doesn’t want to fall into Nico again. She had barely survived the first time. 

And she’s with Julie, now- more or less, they hadn't called each other girlfriends or anything, but. But. She’s with _Julie,_ who’s lovely and bright and kind and she doesn’t deserve this, not from Karolina, not from anyone. 

And while Nico may feel like a tempest, or a heart quake, or some other devastating, all-compassing sort of force of nature, Julie was a safe harbour.

So, she stays with Julie, and if she hugs her tighter when the thought of Nico is near, if she kisses her more insistently in greeting, if she makes an effort to be the best girlfriend (?) possible, it’s certainly not born out of misguided guilt. Nope. Not a chance.

She doesn’t like the fact it feels like she’s using Julie to make herself feel better.

(Karolina is a terrible person.)

Maybe that’s what makes her say her next words to Julie, interrupting what was an otherwise peaceful evening making out in Julie’s very private, very comfortable couch.

“I want to introduce you to my friends.”

If Julie is surprised by the abrupt change of pace, she doesn’t show it. “You already did.”

“Like on purpose, though. And I didn’t mean Gert or Molly. Or like, I meant _them_ but also the other kids from Pride?”

“The GSA kids?”

“No!” and she has to laugh at that, because, okay _,_ most of their friend group did end up not being straight, so it’s not like Julie’s _wrong_ exactly, “My childhood friends, babe.”

“I know _babe_ ,” Julie smirks, popping the b in babe like an idiot, and Karolina just has to kiss her, “I was joking.”

“You’re bad at jokes.”

“You’re rude.”

“So?”

“Yeah,” Julie agrees, and her smile is so bright it could power up all of L.A., “I’d like to get to know your new old friends.”

(Karolina doesn’t deserve her.)

“Okay. I have a meet on Friday, so we could do Saturday?”

She wants to stop weighting her whole life to one night.

“Okay,” Julie whispers back before kissing Karolina again.

(Karolina pushes every thought of Nico out of her head.)

(She wants to deserve her.)

**

Karolina, truthfully, has never understood make-up beyond putting on her eyeliner and mascara. 

Gert says it’s because she’s already been blessed enough with her face that it’s a divine right she doesn’t know the difference between foundation and blush. Karolina just thinks it’s a mix of being a lazy and leftover embarrassment from having to ask her mother for help and having been brushed away.

In any case, Karolina is bad at make-up. Like really bad. Which is why it’s surprising to see her bent over her mirror in the bathroom trying to obtain what Gert had called a cat-eye.

She sighs in frustration before rubbing it all off again.

There’s no need to be nervous about tonight, logically. 

She knows Molly adores Julie, Victor was too nice to say or do anything that would make Julie uncomfortable, and Chase will probably be too busy fumbling his words around Gert to notice her beyond a grin and a wave- and Gert was rough, yes, but Julie had already met her and survived to tell the tale, so.

Then there’s Nico. 

(She’d like to keep pretending she isn’t so nervous because she’s introducing Julie and Nico officially for the first time.)

And she and Nico had already hung around each other solo enough times there’s no left-over embarrassment from a different time they both pretend not to remember. It’s only Nico, after all, and once upon a time Karolina used to know her like one does a childhood dream- only in Karolina’s case, Nico _was_ her dream, but those were details.

So, there was no reason to be worried. Really. Her friends would- will- love Julie.

She picks the eyeliner pen up again.

She senses more than sees Julie poking her head into the small bathroom.

Julie just watches silently as Karolina makes a valiant effort to not poke her eye out. Karolina groans in frustration and Julie huffs what sounds like a giggle and a sigh all at once. “Okay, why are you freaking out more about this than I am?”

“I’m not freaking out."

“Says the girl holding her eyeliner like a sword.”

Karolina drops said pen. 

Julie takes it in her hand, before taking Karolina’s face in her hands and carefully applying a thin line of eyeliner that ends in the dreaded triangle Karolina had been trying to do for the better part of twenty minutes.

“Thank you,” she says softly when Julie was done.

Julie pecks her lips, more a featherlight brush than anything. “I’m starting to think you only keep me around for the make-up privileges.”

“That and the status that comes with dating the head cheerleader, of course,” Karolina tilts her head up for a real kiss, only to be shoved away by Julie.

“Nope. You’re not messing up my lipstick when we’re already late.”

Karolina smirks. “So, you are freaking out a little.”

“Maybe. They’re your friends, your family.”

“They are, but you’re important too.”

Julie doesn’t say anything but the way her smile drops a little, the way she turns away from her, Karolina knows that she’s doing a terrible show of demonstrating it.

She wants to do better.

“If you think you’re not ready, I can call it off,” she stands up, wrapping an arm around Julie’s midriff, tangling their fingers together and resting her chin on her shoulder, “We stay here and watch that absurd movie about cheerleaders again.”

Julie elbows her in the gut gently. “Don’t pretend you don’t like 'Bring It On'.”

“I only like it for the cheerleaders’ outfits. Clearly, I have a type.”

She laughs as she ducks away from Julie’s honestly too well-aimed punch.

“C’ mon we’re already late,” Julie offers her hand and Karolina’s heart doesn’t skip a beat, but she wants it to, “And I heard it’s karaoke night!”

“You’re not making me sing, Power,” Karolina pretend scowl falls apart the moment Julie tugs at their joined hands.

“We’ll see.”

**

When they arrive, Karolina takes her time ordering Julie’s drink, takes her time kissing Julie softly while said drink is being made, because she wants to stay in this peace a while longer before two very different but as important parts of her life crash together.

Julie watches her as if she knows, but she kisses her back and then her cheek in thanks for the drink.

Karolina spots her friends- or more like, Molly spots them and excitingly waves them over- and Julie engulfs Gert into a hug in greeting immediately, apparently emboldened by the fact she’d already met her once and survived to tell the tale. Gert only hugs her back when Karolina looks at her with imploring eyes.

Molly doesn’t need to be forced into the hug, jumping on Julie as soon as she releases her sister, and Karolina knows the major reason she likes Julie is because she’s a cheerleader and Molly is in the dance crew, but she’s not in the habit to look gift horses in the mouth, at least not tonight.

Julie’s smile is self-satisfied and a little bit smug when Molly starts talking a mile an hour about some new choreography Julie had been creating for the cheerleaders, and Karolina has to stop herself from rolling her eyes with a laugh.

“Molly, wait until I’ve introduced her to the others at least?”

“Okay,” Molly drawls, and what’s with her friends and being brats? “But only because it’s you K.”

“Thank you. So,” she makes a dramatic flair with her hand, “This is Julie. Julie, this is the others.”

Julie waves and Karolina’s hand goes to rest on the small of her back for moral support.

Chase’s grinning back at her like the happy-go-lucky dumbass he usually is, mouthing a good job to Karolina like Julie’s blind or something. She doesn’t know whether to laugh or groan in pain.

Karolina’s eyes then go to Victor, who’s leaning halfway into Gert- and she wonders if Gert notices, if their friend group was ever anything more than a glorified circle of unrequited loves and heartbreaks- and who’s giving her a thumb ups on the sly, and he’s clearly spending too much time with Chase too, then.

Karolina leaves Nico’s reaction last- she pretends not to know why. She shouldn’t have worried much, though, because Nico has a pleasant smile on her face- yes, it looks like she swallowed glass, but that’s just Nico’s definition of a pleasant smile. 

She ignores the bile forming in her gut at Nico’s nonreaction. It’s not like she wanted her to have a reaction.

(She’s still so bitter at her, and they _should_ sit down and talk about the past, but she doesn’t want to speak of it. If she says any of it out loud, that would make it real, and Karolina isn't ready for that.)

“Hi, I’m Nico I don’t think we’ve met yet.”

“Julie, nice to meet you.”

Karolina sees the exact second when Nico puts together the fact Julie doesn’t know who she is, exactly- or maybe she should say who Nico had been. It’s a sequence of gradually lifting a single eyebrow while tilting her head slightly to the side that looks more attractive than Karolina cares to admit.

“So, I hear it’s karaoke night?” she blurts out, tearing her eyes away from Nico, Molly jumping on the wagon just as quickly as Karolina had hoped, latching onto Julie’s other arm like a very cute Kraken.

“Do you sing Julie? Do you have a nice voice? Can we sing something together?”

Julie, to her credit, smiles pleasantly at her. “Sure, Molly. I’m not as good as Karolina, but I get by.”

“Karolina sang for you? You really must be special,” Gert’s voice sounds too incredulous to be anything other than mocking, but Julie either lets it slide or doesn’t notice. Karolina glares at her in warning anyway.

“Oh she hasn’t, I heard her once under the shower.”

“You don’t like singing for people?” Nico suddenly chimes in on the conversation, brows furrowed.

Karolina shrugs. Nico opens her mouth, likely to say something else they both might regret, when Julie’s arm comes to rest on her shoulder, and there’s a moment where Karolina feels the urge to shrug it off. 

Suddenly, she doesn’t like the weight of it on her shoulders. Suddenly it makes her skin crawl and tingle in all the wrong ways. It doesn’t feel right.

She swallows the need down. She can’t keep carrying Nico on her shoulders. She needs to move on. 

And when she grasps Julie’s hand tighter in hers, she doesn’t know if she’s trying to prove a point to Nico or just herself.

“So, who’s first?”

She lets Molly’s enthusiasm carry the group back to their table and to safe waters, far from Gert’s knowing gaze. 

It doesn’t take long for the night to descend into a chaotic evening of drinking and subjecting oneself to the mortifying ordeal of singing in front of your friends and about twenty strangers.

She supposes there’s still _some_ justice in the world, though, because Karolina gets to watch Gert badly rap her way through a song Karolina doesn’t know but is still pretty sure should not be singed any way near how Gert had been singing it.

Julie actually gets roped into singing with Molly, but she takes her fall gracefully, singing and dancing to NSYNC like she felt no shame. Karolina may film the whole thing, for blackmail purposes, but she also pecks Julie’s mouth proudly when she comes back to the table.

She catches Nico’s eyes on her as Julie slips back into the booth and under Karolina’s arm, and something tight clamps around her gut as she does.

And she’s oh so tired of holding herself up by her heartstrings over Nico.

So maybe it’s more than a little fucked up when she properly kisses Julie for the first time of the night, pushing her hand into her hair and tugging and breathing in her scent, but keeps her eyes open and trained on Nico. Karolina never said she was the queen of good decisions, though.

She feels Julie melt against her, and this is when Karolina should realize that maybe she should stop this whole charade now instead of later, that maybe this will bring more pain than it’s worth. She closes her eyes and kisses Julie back.

When she opens her eyes again, Nico’s nowhere to be seen.

She tells herself she doesn’t care.

(Her fingers itch for a cigarette.)

Karolina manages to stand the urge to smoke for another twenty minutes, before giving up.

She puts on a smile as she slips outside leaving Julie to talk animatedly about Avril Lavigne with Chase, of all people. Her fingers fly to the pack of cigarettes she had stashed in her coat pocket while Julie wasn’t looking as soon as she’s out of their sights.

She hears Nico’s voice as soon as she approaches the corner.

“So, Julie’s her actual girlfriend now?”

She stops without meaning to, feet scuffling back until her shadow is hidden, too. She stops breathing.

“Seems so,” what sounds like Victor’s voice replies.

“Oh. Cool. Just making sure.”

“Nico,” Victor’s voice now had a warning tinge to it, like Victor’s voice never was.

“I won’t-- She just seems… great,” Karolina can see a fragment of Nico’s smile and she looks like she just had to swallow knives, “She seems great.”

She puts the pack back in her pocket as she quietly backs away, wondering what the hell she had just overheard. Because why would Nico sound like that when asking about her girlfriend? Why would she sound small, and something so close to heartbroken Karolina doesn’t even want to name it?

Why is Karolina asking herself any of these questions in the first place, contemplating all the answers, while her girlfriend is right on the other side of the door? 

She doesn’t realize she’s back at their table until Julie is touching her arm gently. “You back already? I thought you were trying to slip a cig without me noticing.”

“I just went to the bathroom,” Karolina lies, a placating smile already on her lips.

“Good, because it’s your turn now.”

“My what now? C’ mon Gert, don’t ruin this beautiful friendship by--”

“Don’t try it, babe,” Julie pushes her back out of the booth, traitor, “She already put your name and song down.”

“You let her _choose_ the song?”

Julie pouts her lips, tilting her head, the perfect picture of innocence. “I shouldn’t have?”

“Karolina, it’s your turn! Come on up!” the guy standing behind the mixer calls for her, and she watches her whole life pass her by.

“Shit.”

“I’m sure it’s not _that_ bad.”

Karolina catches Gert’s grin and she’s sure it’s worse.

Chase ignores every request for mercy and more or less shoves her up the makeshift stage.

She looks at the screen by her right as familiar notes begin to fill the air.

She sighs internally. _Well, fuck you too, Gert._

Unfortunately, she can’t do anything but start to sing the words flashing on the tv screen. “There are days when I wake up that I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

Chase and Molly start cheering as soon as she laughs and starts to embrace her fate, tapping her foot to the beat of the song.

“I was sixteen with an open heart, windows down in a beat-up car,” she nods her head along to the song. 

She’s almost too caught up in the song to notice the moment Nico and Victor come back into the bar, she closes her eyes and like some sick joke from fate when she opens them back Nico is there.

“And she was beautiful,” she almost whispers in the mic, her voice faltering, and it feels like she and Nico are the only one in the room, “She was beautiful.”

She shakes her head, finding her friends back in the crowd, finding Julie in the crowd, who’s smiling and cheering, and Karolina can’t take it, her heart crying out loud.

She tries not to think of Nico as she keeps singing the words of a song she had screamed drunk at 3 am for so long in the long car rides back to her dorm, Gert in the driver’s seat. She didn’t think Gert had been paying much attention to that. She should know better to underestimate Gert.

“When I was dumb and the world was young and she was beautiful,” drunk Karolina sang at 3 am, and sober Karolina now sings in front of the girl she was singing it for what was not nearly enough time ago.

She ends the song to what feels like shattering silence, before a roar of applause comes from the general direction of her friends, a few claps scattered around the room, too.

She doesn’t know why she risks a glance in Nico’s direction, and it takes less than a second to understand how much of a mistake that was. 

She’s standing in a room full of people, her friends are clapping and hollering and whistling like maniacs, and the only one she’s paying attention to isn't looking back at her.

Until she is.

And Karolina doesn’t know how to deal with the look on Nico’s face as she stares back eyes wide and mouth slightly gaping, like Nico had forgotten how to breathe for a while. It’s close to being enough to knock her down.

Her throat dries as Nico doesn’t avert her eyes.

The spell is broken when the guy behind the mixer claps her on the shoulder. She hands the microphone back to the guy and hops off the stage, Victor and Chase already there to more or less carry back to their table.

Julie pecks her lips like she was a soldier back from the war. “Who knew you were so talented?”

Karolina awkwardly laughs, as Molly tugs her back into the booth.

“Stop being gross!”

“Yeah!” Chase laughs his boyish laugh, before offering Molly a high five, “Stop making us realize how painfully single we all are.”

“There’s a quick solution to that one,” Karolina quips before she can think better of it, “Just ask--”

It’s almost instantaneous, the combination of kick to the shin courtesy of Gert and frozen grin on Chase’s face, that make her stop in her tracks.

Julie, thank God, saves both her shins from amputation and her body from hypothermia by loudly demanding a song from Victor.

It’s only when Victor is already belting his way through ‘Matilda’, that Karolina notices that Nico had disappeared. And so had Chase.

Something unexpected and unpleasant stirs in her gut at the thought of the two of them alone, even when the rational part of her brain reminds her that Chase was more than a bit in love with Gert, or the fact that Nico had already said that they weren’t together like that.

Julie pulls at her sleeve excitedly and she shouldn’t even be thinking about Nico right now.

Chase comes back, eventually, but Nico stays gone.

(She shouldn’t be thinking about Nico.)

She excuses herself, pecking Julie’s mouth before slipping outside. 

The cold air hits her like a punch in the face. She rubs her hands together, before lighting her cigarette. For the first time in forever, she struggles to find pleasure in the nicotine, in the smoke hanging in her throat.

She crushes it and throws it in a nearby bin. She sighs and more or less collapses against the brick wall. She shuts her eyes.

(She shouldn’t be thinking about Nico.)

_What the hell are you doing, Karolina Dean?_

“Karolina!”

She startles, eyes opening to find a Nico jogging towards her.

“Karolina,” Nico calls for her again, and Karolina has to turn to her, she just has to, “I was looking for you.”

“Yeah? You disappeared from the scene quite fast.”

Nico sways in place a little, and Karolina steadies her with an arm around her without thinking about it. She should really be thinking about it. 

“Yeah,” Nico breathes back, eyes so full and clear Karolina almost gets lost trying to find the specks of gold under the moonlight, “Listen I wanted… the song you were singing.”

“Yeah?” Karolina breathes out again and watching Nico under the flickering light feels like the quiet before the storm, and Karolina should go now, probably, go back in Julie’s arms and forget what loving Nico feels like.

She doesn’t.

“No. Not that. I… oh, this is hard. Okay,” and Nico takes a deep breath like she was bracing for a fall she didn’t know she’d survive, “I remember how it felt to be loved by you. And I remember how it feels to love you.”

Karolina’s arm might as well have broken the sound barrier with how fast it moved.

Karolina’s heart might, too, if it keeps beating that fast.

She swallows, taking a step back, then another. She processes Nico’s words backwards and forwards and takes another step back.

“Because I loved you. I really, really loved you. I loved you so much it made it hard to breathe.”

Karolina curls and uncurls her fingers in fists, her fingernails digging into the soft flesh of her palm. 

She starts slowly breathing out, or maybe trying to breathe, she just feels her chest moving up and down, and up and down again, but she finds no relief in the action, no oxygen flowing back into her veins. 

She can’t breathe. 

“And I love you still.”

She needs to breathe. 

She takes another step back, her shoe’s heel scraping against the brick wall behind her.

End of the line.

“Why do… why do you look angry?” Nico’s voice is barely a whisper over the sound of Karolina’s blood rushing in her ears, and even that was too loud.

(Karolina wants to scream.)

“Do you really need to ask?” she hisses instead, “I just introduced you to my girlfriend, Nico. My girlfriend!”

“I’m sorry. I’m still in love with you,” Nico continues, her face painfully honest, and Karolina can’t take this, she can’t, not when her heart skips three beats the moment she hears those words out of Nico’s lips.

(Karolina _really_ wants to scream.)

“That’s not fair.”

“I know,” there’s a sad smile playing at Nico’s lips, Karolina squeezes her eyes shut- because she can’t, she can’t, _she can’t_ \- “I’m afraid my love for you has always been selfish.”

She keeps her eyes closed. “Don’t do this, Nico.”

“Why?”

She opens her eyes.

“If you really need to ask, I don’t think you never loved me at all.”

Opening her eyes might have been a mistake, in retrospect, because Karolina doesn’t know what to do, how to live with the way Nico is looking at her now- all full of hope, all full of heartbreak.

“I know,” Nico’s voice breaks in two, Karolina buries her hands in the sleeves of her flannel to keep from reaching out, her body so unused to not offer comfort to Nico it physically hurts to do so, “I know I made a mistake, possibly the biggest one of my life, and I was young, and I regret it, but--”

“You regret it.”

“I’ll always regret hurting you. But never loving you,” Nico sighs but Karolina is the one who can’t seem to breathe, “No, never loving you. And maybe--”

“It’s never done me any good, loving you,” she interrupts before Nico could say something else, something worse, that would destroy her definitively.

“I… Karolina.”

It hurts when Nico looks at her like that. It hurts to see Nico hurt, it always had, but Karolina is so angry she’s able to not care for once.

“I can’t do this with you, Nico. You can’t just barge into my life after three years and then act like everything is fine. You broke my heart.”

 _No one could ever come close to breaking my heart like you did,_ is what she doesn’t say.

 _No one had ever come as close to my heart like you did, either,_ is what she doesn’t say.

“I thought it was never mine to break in the first place.”

And Nico’s oh so wrong because it was, then. 

It isn't, now. 

It shouldn’t be, now. 

She turns to leave.

“Karolina,” Nico breathes her name out again, and Karolina doesn’t want to, but she stills.

Nothing feels right, nothing she could say would be right, and Karolina feels like she has to scratch each word out of her throat like rust from a shut lock. 

(There was a time where Karolina would have given anything to open the door that had been pried shut the moment she had woken up in an empty room.)

(She likes to pretend she doesn’t still.)

“You’re drunk, Nico,” she says. She doesn’t know if she’s trying to remind herself of Nico, but it’s necessary to point it out, it’s important to point it out when Nico’s eyes make it so easy to forget why she couldn’t do this with Nico, why she can’t do this with Nico.

“Maybe. But that doesn’t mean I don’t--”

(Her eyes make it so easy to forget.)

“You can’t do this to me, Nico. I’d have followed you anywhere, and you just left.”

“You left too,” Nico says, voice barely above a whisper.

“You left me first. You left me always.”

 _And all the things that could have happened between us never did,_ she doesn’t continue her thought out loud.

The world was falling apart around her, and she had never been fast enough to catch it.

There’s unshed tears in Nico’s eyes, and Karolina doesn’t want to ache for each one of them, but she does. God, she does. 

She watches Nico swallow her tears. “I came back.”

“Too late.”

“Am I now?”

And Karolina shouldn’t want this. 

She shouldn’t want Nico to want her now. She shouldn’t want to think of Nico as she kisses Julie. She doesn’t want to still have so much anger about those nights. 

Karolina just wants to move on.

And that’s a lie because she just wants... she doesn’t know what she wants, exactly. She just knows that whatever it is, it has everything to do with Nico, and just for that it's a terrible idea.

Her voice almost breaks as she says yes, as watches Nico’s face crumble. 

(She regrets her answer the second it’s out of her mouth.)

(She can’t take it back.)

“Okay. That’s… okay.”

“Nico…”

She tries reaching out, but Nico takes a step back, shaking her head with what could only be classified as agonizing pain. 

“I… I’m drunk. I better go home.”

“Let me call you an Uber,” Karolina says- because there’s nothing else she can do, nothing else she can say. She had made her choice and now she could only watch as Nico walked away from her.

“It’s fine. I’ll-- I’ll just call Alison.”

And Karolina can’t do anything other than watch Nico get in a stranger’s car and wash the heartbreak out of her veins.

**

When she manages to do anything that wasn’t thinking about Nico and go back inside, she makes up some flimsy excuse for Nico’s abrupt goodbye that she’s sure half of her friends don’t actually believe.

With Nico’s departure also comes the end of the night, which is honestly a blessing, because she doesn’t know how to pretend her heart isn't bleeding out of her chest.

Karolina follows Julie back to her apartment without even noticing she’s doing so.

She doesn’t linger on the reason why they always go to Julie’s. It’s practical to do so. Julie doesn’t have roommates. Karolina does. Julie has a proper, big bed. Karolina doesn’t. So she never lingers on the reason why she also never stays the nights if she can help it.

“So… you’re going to tell me why Nico kept looking at me like I was the one who told her MCR broke up?” Julie asks, throwing her jacket on the desk chair and turning back to her.

“They’re back together actually.”

Julie stares at her and Karolina feels like she’s getting yellow carded. 

“You know what I mean.”

“Don’t take it personally,” she tries to shrug it off lightly, “She doesn’t like most people.”

That doesn’t seem to appease Julie much, though. “I don’t… I don’t want to pry or anything, but she looked at me like she was your ex or something.”

Or something feels more appropriate than Karolina cares to admit. 

“She’s not.”

“Does _she_ know that?”

(Nico had told her she loved her.)

She shakes her head.

“Jules.”

“K,” Julie tries again, and this is not right, because who in their right mind would ask the deceased to write their own eulogy?

“We were nothing. Nothing of importance anyway.”

So why should Karolina have to talk about the person she had died for?

Julie suddenly feels smaller, as she wraps her arm around herself. “So I shouldn’t be worried?”

(Nico had told her she loved her.)

And Karolina never stays the night and she’s always stayed with a foot halfway outside the door. No wonder Julie isn't secure in their relationship.

She walks over to her, takes her face in her hands and kisses her once, twice. 

“No. Julie, no,” she says, and the lies she told once upon a time, she tells again, “You shouldn’t be.”

She’s a terrible person.

“I just don’t want to be _that_ girlfriend, you know?” Julie’s laugh is bitter, and Karolina doesn’t ever want to hear that sound coming from her lips ever again. She doesn’t ever want to be the one to cause that laugh ever again either.

“What girlfriend?”

“The jealous one, the clingy one. But,” Julie sighs, “She looks at you, Karolina. And you look back.”

“I’m with you, now. I’m committed to you.”

“I know. But is it enough?”

Karolina just kisses her in answer because she knows she can’t say yes with the conviction Julie needs to hear. Julie kisses her back, and Karolina has the weirdest feeling she knows that too.

(Nico had told her she loved her.)

**

Karolina is sixteen and she tastes copper with each breath as she stands on the top of a roof of some bullshit hotel nobody should ever have enough money to pay a room for. 

She doesn’t know where the taste comes from, exactly. It could be from her lip, or the inside of her cheek, or from her heart. She just knows it’s there.

Sixteen isn't a kind age on anyone, she knows that. She's coming around to that age where growing up had stopped feeling like an accomplishment and had started becoming a burden instead. She wonders if any age will be kind to her again.

She pushes her hands into her hair with a sigh. 

It’s too long, Karolina hadn't always thought so, but lately, it’s all she can think about. She wants to braid it off her neck. She wants to pin it back to her head. She wants to shave it all off, to free herself of its dead, lifeless weight.

She wants to be free.

Karolina is sixteen and alone on top of a roof until she isn't. 

Nico is quiet as she steps closer like she would break more than just the silence if she made any noise at all. Karolina is only as quiet as her heart can let her be.

Nico looks at her from the corner of her eye, and Karolina has to stop herself from laughing. She'd almost think Nico shy if she didn’t know better. 

Which is weird, Karolina thinks, that she knows better and yet they've never actually _talked_ before- like, really actually talked. Someone she has known for almost all of her life, and they had never exchanged enough words, the right words for Karolina to feel justified in the bits and pieces she knows of Nico or for the way her heart skips when the girl smiles at her. 

It's weird. 

They were never even introduced to each other, either, which is somewhat weirder and considerably more hilarious to Karolina's drunken brain? So, she offers her hand to Nico with a flourish and what she hopes comes off as a charming grin and not a drunken smile. “Karolina Dean.”

“I... know?” Nico says, frowning slightly, her eyebrows climbing up her forehead. It's cute.

“I know you know,” Karolina says slowly with a grin- or maybe slurs but every experience is relative, so who knows, really? “But isn’t it fucked up we never got to introduce ourselves?”

“It kinda is.”

“Right? So?”

“Nico Minoru, a pleasure to meet you.”

Karolina laughs brightly, taking her hand in hers. 

Their rings clink loudly in the silence of the night, Nico’s fingers slipping in between hers like they were made to fit into Karolina’s. They’re pretty, small hands, she thinks, small in a graceful way, in the fit perfectly together way, in the Karolina is already way too much in love way.

She almost forgets to let go. 

Nico always felt like funnel cakes at a carnival, sticky on her fingers, sugar coating every part of Karolina she touches, until she’s the only thing Karolina can taste, the only thing Karolina could ever think about.

She laughs again, this time awkwardly, rubbing the back of her neck and she just knows her cheeks are flushed too.

Nico just looks at her, tilting her head slightly in that cute way of hers, like Karolina is some kind of puzzle she can’t put together. Karolina feels unsteady under her gaze, and she knows that this moment means something, that this moment she will remember for the rest of her life, so she holds her gaze and waits.

“It was brave,” Nico ends up on saying when she realizes Karolina will not speak first, “What you did back there.”

Karolina shrugs, because it’s not exactly true, not exactly right. “I didn’t mean to be brave, I just wanted to be me. I just _want_ to be me.”

“And who is that?”

And Karolina could answer honestly now. She could say it and keep her chin up and hold her back straight and tell Nico exactly who she is. But Nico blinks at the moment passes and she just smiles, like Karolina Dean was nothing more than a pretty smile on a pretty face.

“Karolina Dean, I thought we went over that.”

Nico sighs like she’s disappointed by Karolina’s answer somehow, and Karolina doesn’t know what she did wrong, but she desperately needs to make it right again.

“I don’t know who I am,” Karolina admits, eyes to the floor, because to look at Nico would feel like too much and not enough at the same time, “Not yet, but sometimes I forget who I’m supposed to be.”

And when she finally musters the courage to look at Nico, she’s looking at her like she’s _seeing_ her for the first time. Which feels special. Which totally doesn’t leave Karolina breathless. 

“Me too. Everyone else seems to know.”

“They’re faking it,” she whispers like she’s telling Nico a secret, which she is, in a way, “I doubt there’s a single one of them who isn’t terrified too.”

Nico tilts her head and Karolina physically restrains her hand to brush the stray stubborn black hair that frame her face as she does so. “Maybe Gert.”

“Yeah. Okay, I’ll give you that one. But she’s obviously the exception.”

“Obviously.”

A few beat pass and Karolina shrugs because they won’t discover who they are for a bit yet, so might as well put it off until the last minute possible, right? 

She shakes the bottle in her hand. 

“Well, want to get drunk about it?”

“Please.”

Karolina thinks there’s something about getting drunk on rooftops. Something. Something special about it, something… something romantic about it.

And, no. Not romantic.

She watches as Nico tries not to choke on the really expensive vodka Karolina had swiped from their parents. She fails, and some dribble from her chin as she coughs, her eyes watery and some black smudging from the tears.

Yeah. Definitely not romantic.

She lets herself fall to the ground, just short of the edge, her feet dangling into the emptiness beneath her.

“Careful. I know everyone thinks you’re an angel, but I don’t think you can actually fly.”

She lifts her head to look at Nico, and she knows she’s just teasing, but. “Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Think I’m an angel.”

“I know better,” Nico says, and she looks at Karolina with a weird sort of smile that makes her want to test everyone’s theory and see if she really can fly.

And Karolina may not know who she was exactly, but she knew she would never be a bad girl or a mean girl or whatever sort of stereotype people think she looks like, but. But she wants Nico to keep looking at her like that. 

(Like she’s danger.)

Karolina waits for Nico to sit down next to her.

There’s a quiet grace to how Nico moves, Karolina supposes it’s remnants of her martial arts training, but the found reason doesn’t diminish the awe Karolina feels as she watches her fold onto her knees in one fluid movement.

It feels like watching a river flow, or leaves fall in the wind, like something beautiful in its simplicity, its naturality.

Karolina takes her bottle back and swings a shot, Nico’s laughter echoing in the night.

(Time stops having a meaning after that.)

And Karolina knows she does this-- this thing, where she over analyses a situation, and splits it into facts, smaller pieces and smaller pieces until it fits in every category that it can. 

And then she opens those boxes and thinks some more about them, too. 

And then she forgets where she had started from, exactly, and she finds she doesn’t know, but she does know she’s more anxious now than when she had started.

She knows it’s a part of the whole clinically diagnosed anxiety thing she’s got going on and that she can’t exactly help it either, but sometimes she wishes she didn’t do that, because she’s quite literally going mad, revising every interaction she has ever had with Nico. 

Always.

Each moment feels like gasping for breath with her head barely hanging over the water.

She wonders if she’s allowed to think of her like that. She wonders if she's allowed to look at her like that.

Probably not.

Maybe that's why she always turns the other way when Nico flashes her eyes over to her.

She apologizes, each time she gets caught. A short laugh, maybe a giggle, avoiding eyes and a quick, “I'm sorry, I didn’t mean to stare.”

Nico laughs like she hadn't even meant to look over at Karolina in the first place- because Nico likes punk rock bands, and dark clothes, and Alex. While Karolina likes the pretty, soft things- and she won’t apologize for that, but she also loves Nico, and that seems like a thing she should apologize for.

So she bits her tongue until she tastes copper again.

 _You look like all the paintings I’ve never drawn,_ she doesn’t say, _like all the songs I’ve screamed while I was driving in the night, like all the love poems I’ve never believed but always wanted._

Karolina is sixteen and she’s a fool who could be falling in love with a straight girl, a fool who’s kidding no one, as she’s already there. 

She’s been there a while, waiting.

And it’s easy to wait for something you know it’s never going to happen. Maybe Karolina isn’t exactly the best example of patience, maybe she just knows better than to have enough hope to make the waiting an agony.

She takes another swing at the bottle, before passing it back to Nico. Their fingers brush and Karolina almost drops the bottle on some poor passer-by without meaning to. Nico doesn’t laugh, but there’s a twinkle in her eyes and Karolina knows she’s going to get teased to an inch of her life for that.

“Butterfingers,” Nico coughs in her hand, like the little shit she was.

Karolina swatted her hand away. “Hey, be nice. I’m sharing.”

“Of course you are,” and Nico’s smile could only be categorized as patronizing as she patted Karolina’s cheek, “Good girl.”

She ignores the spike of heat _that_ sends to the middle of her stomach. “Be nice.”

“Or what?”

Karolina flashes her teeth, leaning into Nico’s space and stealing the bottle right out of her hands. “Or I won’t be so good anymore.”

Nico throat goes up and down, Karolina’s eyes tracking the movement without meaning to, before settling on Nico’s lips. She forces herself to look away before she ends up doing something stupid, like kiss the surprise off of Nico’s face.

“Do you know any constellations?” Nico blurts out all of the sudden, taking the bottle back just as quickly.

Karolina frowns, slightly taken aback from the abrupt change of subject. “A few. My dad taught me some, that time I went with him to Morocco for filming.”

“I remember that. Chase didn’t know who to trail after that summer.”

Karolina groans, closing her eyes and letting herself fall on her back with a dull thud.

“So?”

Karolina opens her eyes to find Nico’s on her. “You can’t see many stars in L.A.”

“There’s enough. Why are you being so shy?”

“I’m not!”

“So?”

“So,” she sighs and points to the sky, finding the easiest stars she knew, “That one is the Big Dipper.”

“Not fair. Everyone knows that one,” Nico falls on her back too, near Karolina, almost too close.

Karolina nudged her. “Smartass. Okay, this one then.”

“Which one?”

“It’s like an A, almost,” she scoots over until their thighs are touching, taking her hand and tracing the lines into the sky. She tries not to acknowledge the fact that Nico’s breath is puffing against her cheek.

“What’s it called?”

“Andromeda,” she drops the hand, but doesn’t break away from Nico’s body heat, “She was this princess who got tied to a cliff to be fed to a sea monster to atone for her parents’ sins.”

Nico’s mouth falls into an oh shaped sigh. 

“She got saved by Perseus,” she takes Nico’s hand again, tracing another pair of lines near the others, “That one. I think.”

Nico doesn’t let go of her hand this time, so Karolina doesn’t either. 

“Do you know any others?”

Her eyes struggle to find the familiar pattern with all the city lights glaring at the sky. “I can’t find it, but there’s this one called Eridanus. It’s a long line near Taurus. It’s supposed to be a river.”

“What’s the story of that one?”

“It’s the river where Apollo’s son fell into when he fell from the sky. He tried to guide the sun across the sky. He couldn’t, so Zeus stroke him down with lightning.”

“That’s tragic,” Nico deadpans, making Karolina huff a laugh.

“Tragedies sell better.”

“True.”

They fall silent, but Nico doesn’t move away, thigh pressed to Karolina’s thigh, shoulder pressed to Karolina’s shoulder.

And it wasn’t like Karolina was… big or anything. 

(God, Gert would kill her if she ever tried to imply that.)

But. But Karolina liked how petite Nico looked next to her. 

She liked how Nico’s hands were smaller than hers, and how when Karolina hugged her, she could wrap her arms around her as tight as she wanted. She liked how Nico fitted against her, how she could rest her head over hers, or kiss her forehead without having to bend or anything.

The point is, Karolina liked how Nico made her feel… strong, protective. Useful. How heteronormative of hers, Gert would say- only not, because Karolina was gay even if she didn't want to say the word out loud yet.

But Karolina’s pretty drunk, too, so she allows herself to feel good about the way Nico makes her feel, the way she always stays on her mind like a drug- not that Karolina would know what drugs feel like, but that’s beside the point.

Because the point is Karolina likes Nico, and this time she’s drunk enough to do something about it. 

“Have I ever told you you're like really pretty?”

(And even that feels like an understatement and oversharing all at once- because Nico was beautiful not just pretty but saying it out loud would be too much, too quick.)

“What?”

“Do you think I’m pretty?”

“I-- yes?”

“Cool. Wanna kiss about it?” Karolina propositions like it’s all a big joke, leaning into Nico’s space and waiting for the slap that never actually comes.

She doesn’t expect for Nico not to answer her with words, instead surging forward and crashing their lips together.

(Not so straight then.)

She honest to God had not expected for it to work.

Then again, she might be dreaming this while slipping into an alcohol-induced coma. Nico tugs at her hair insistently, and nope. Definitely real. Karolina could have never come up with something like this ever.

The kiss is warm and a little sticky from Nico’s black lipstick. Karolina doesn’t mind. She doesn’t think she could muster the brainpower to mind, because Nico was solid under her hands, and pliant under her lips, and everything Karolina had ever dreamt of.

And Karolina knows of old maps and the monsters drawn in the margins, a warning for sailors to heed- _hic sunt dracones,_ here be dragons- and watching Nico had always felt like that. 

Kissing Nico is being devoured by the beasts, crossing past that point of non-return and into uncharted routes that led to the end of the earth. 

Nico moans into the kiss, tilting her head and opening her lips, tongue slipping inside Karolina’s mouth, hot and dirty in a way Karolina had never felt before.

(Let the dragons have her.)

**

In retrospect, she should have expected it.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” Nico whispers against her lips.

Karolina finds herself nodding in answer because Nico is looking at her through hooded lashes and her mouth smeared with black lipstick and Karolina knows already how Alex looks at Nico, anyway, and how Nico looks at Alex, but maybe, maybe, she can make Nico look at her like that, too.

Because in nights like these there’s a feeling, like the smell of rain when you’re standing under a porch, or like the sound of crashing waves while being miles from the ocean, or like the taste of an orange shared. 

And when Karolina risks a glance into Nico’s eyes, there’s meaning in those eyes, there’s everything in those eyes and nothing else seems to matter.

And Karolina’s love never belonged to her, all of it Nico’s. 

Nico’s love only belonged to Karolina in the dark of the night.

And it had been good. It had been great. Until it hadn’t been any more.

With time Karolina learns how to fold her heartbreak into boxes, then into pockets, then into nothing.

They all grow up eventually, and little by little Karolina doesn’t think of Nico each time she wakes up to an empty bed. She remembers, though. She thinks she’ll always remember what loving Nico felt like.

Even if she didn’t want to. Even if Nico didn’t want her to.

Karolina will remember.

**

Here’s the truth, Karolina never forgets.

There are things she locks away, sure, but they’re still _there_ somewhere if she ever wandered there to look for them. 

She locks away every song that made her think of Nico- ‘ _and love is not a victory march’, ‘I have never loved a darker blue than the darkness I have known in you’, ‘all your kisses still taste sweet’_ \- and she locks away every drawing, any drawing- because her hands seem to only know how to draw Nico- and she locks away everything that made her feel broken.

But they’re still _there_.

And maybe she had lost some pieces of herself. Several pieces. And maybe she didn’t notice until they had come back- until _she_ had come back.

And here’s the truth, Karolina had chosen to hold onto Nico again.

She had decided that it was a good gamble, her feelings possibly coming back- even if it felt like they never had gone in the first place- against Nico’s renewed friendship. She had decided that she could handle it. She had not predicted Nico’s feelings as a variable, though.

That may have been a mistake on her part.

Nico’s ignoring her now, she thinks. Not that Karolina had tried to text her, so she doesn’t exactly know. And she doesn’t even know where to start if she were to try and do that- what could she even say, how could she even fix it. 

She doesn’t even know if she wants to.

She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to want.

So she ends up running, like always. 

She runs to practice and then she runs to class, burying herself in work. When that doesn’t work, she spends the days following Julie around, and when she’s busy, following Gert around, which meant too many trips to the library and too many times witnessing her awkward flirting with Chase. 

Its sure beats thinking about the Nico situation, though, so she has no room for complaints.

She kind of wants to complain a bit, though, after the fifth consecutive hour in the library looking at books she doesn’t even know where to start memorizing.

She drops her head on the book with a groan. She’s not going to survive this for much longer.

Gert kicks her in the shin instantly.

Karolina’s eyes fly open. “Hey!”

She ignores the general shushing coming from the other library-goers. She almost kicks Gert back when she notices the overexaggerate nods to her right.

“What?” she hisses, ignoring the shushes coming from all around them. 

She has half a mind to give them all her middle fingers when she hears a whisper to her right. “Hi.”

Karolina’s eyes widen, her head slowly turning towards the sound of Nico’s voice.

“Hi,” she says back, blinking twice and almost expecting for Nico to just disappear.

She doesn’t.

(It honest to God awe-inducing how it only took Nico two weeks to lick her wounds. It took Karolina three years and it still wasn’t enough.)

“Can we talk?”

Karolina follows her out wordlessly, leaving her books and her bag behind and ignoring Gert’s faces and thumbs up.

“I’m sorry, about the other night,” Nico starts, sitting down on one of the steps in front of the library, blatantly ignoring the fact they couldn’t sit there- not that Karolina will be the one to tell her so.

She sits next to her. “Are you?”

Nico doesn’t answer her, the truth more than evident in her silence.

“Why did you leave that night?” Karolina blurts out because she needs a reason to remember why she can’t do this with Nico again.

“You had just rejec--”

“Not that,” she interrupts her, because she can’t hear the end of that sentence and stay sane at the same time, “You know what night I'm referring to.”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Probably not, but I have-- I need to understand, I need to--”

“Why now?”

Karolina just looks at her because, truthfully, she doesn’t have an answer where the truth comes screaming out of.

“Okay… okay,” Nico sighs, her eyes flickering between Karolina and the marble stairs, “I was messed up, Karolina, I was really messed up. And you… you were the truest person I ever saw, you just stood there, on that roof, tall and true and so beautiful. How could I ever compare?”

“You were the brightest star to me,” she says, maybe much more softly than Nico deserved, but she says it anyway because for once she doesn’t want to hide. 

For the first time in three years, she wants to look Nico straight into her eyes and tell her all the things they’ve been dancing around for the past weeks.

Nico’s answering smile is sad, sadder than Karolina feels she can stand. “I couldn’t bear it.”

“Bear what?”

“The way you used to look at me.”

“So you left?” Karolina crosses her arms, trying not to seep the anger she feels into her voice, “Because you thought you didn’t deserve it or some other bullshit?”

Nico looks away and it’s all the answer she’s ever going to get, probably.

“I’d always forgive you. As soon as you went away, as soon as I woke up in an empty bed. I’d always forgive you,” Karolina continues, because once she’s started she doesn’t know how to stop.

“You shouldn’t have. You shouldn’t forgive me now.”

“Maybe I don’t, now.”

“Do you not?”

“I don’t know,” she answers her because this feels like the only moment she could ever tell Nico the truth. Because, really, what should she feel about Nico now? She’s only aware of the things she _shouldn’t_ feel for Nico, the things she feels anyway.

(Nico was different, Karolina’s feelings for her were not.)

The silence stretches between them like a cat under the midday sun, and just when Karolina thinks Nico is about to do something- kiss her, maybe, and break her open- she opens her mouth instead.

“I went on a date with Alison.”

Karolina’s sure her face looks ridiculous right about now, all wide eyes and open mouth, but she’s too shocked to care. Honestly, the emotional whiplash she just had could classify as a full-on crash test dummy type.

“I’ve asked her on a date,” Nico keeps on talking hastily, perhaps uncaring of the look that Karolina knows is painted on her face, perhaps unseeing, “And she said yes.”

Karolina’s brain tries and tries to compute the information Nico had just shoved in her general direction. She feels like a loading screen on an old, ninety’s computer.

Nico had asked Alison out. _Nico_ had asked _Alison_ out on a date.

(She tells herself she cannot be upset about it. Karolina had told her she had moved on, and Nico was trying to do the same. Shouldn’t matter how it was a lie in the first place.)

(And Julie, she reminds herself. Julie.)

“Oh. I didn’t know she was your type,” is what comes out of Karolina’s mouth after the silence had stretched too long for Karolina to look anything but a fool.

“I’m bi,” Nico says, an edge to her voice that makes Karolina want to backtrack immediately, “Girls are my type, too.”

Karolina knew that notion first-hand. Even if sometimes her worst parts tried to convince her that Nico had only used her for the thrill of it. 

She doesn’t like those parts of herself.

Anyway, Karolina should stop thinking about that while Nico is looking at her like she was three seconds away from giving a Gert level lecture on biphobia.

“That was NOT what I meant!” she swallows, eyes wide, because what had she meant, really, and why was every conversation she had with Nico so complicated?

 _Blonde, tall, blue eyes_ , a voice in Karolina’s brain suggests cruelly, _reminds you of someone?_

“I just thought you didn’t like her,” she concludes hastily because she couldn’t-- she can’t think like this.

(Julie, she reminds herself again.) 

(Julie, Julie, Julie.)

Nico looks mollified, too, her shoulders dropping down from where they had been glued to her ears, her eyebrows not in an actually quite cartoony frown.

“Oh. I do like her,” she says, and Karolina resist the sudden urge to jump down the staircase.

“I’m happy for you?” Karolina tries to follow the script, but it feels like Nico had jumped ahead by ten feet and she didn’t know how to catch up. She had never managed to catch up to Nico.

“Thanks.”

Karolina nods once, with gravity. “Good talk.”

Nico laughs, and she can finally breathe.

“I’m sorry I didn’t mean to go off on you.”

“No, no. It was…” Karolina trails off, “I know how people can be.”

“Yeah, but I know you,” Nico says and Karolina’s traitorous heart kickstarts like a faulty engine, “I know _you_ , and you are kind and nothing like other people. I’m sorry.”

Karolina shrugs, because what else can she do? “It’s fine… So, Alison?”

“Yeah,” Nico says, and she’s _actually_ blushing as she says it. 

Karolina tries to be happy for her.

(She was the one who told her she had moved on, could she really blame her if Nico tried to do the same?)

“I really didn’t think she would be your type. She’s very…” she tries to find the right adjective- _blonde, tall, blue eyes_ \- she tries not to die inside too much, “Cool.”

“What are you trying to say, Dean?”

“That you’re not. But it’s fine, you get used to it, really.”

Nico shoves her, and Karolina shoves her back.

She barely has the time to register Nico’s evil glint in her eyes before Karolina’s suddenly on her back, Nico’s face a little too close to hers for comfort. 

Not that she notices. 

Karolina smirks, before pivoting around Nico’s grip and pushing her almost off the staircase, effectively pinning her between her body and the void.

“You alright there?”

“Fuck you,” Nico spits out, her face really, really close to Karolina’s. And would you look at that? How curious.

Karolina tries to laugh, but it comes out much breathier than intended. “You wish.”

And note to self: ‘you wish’ is _not_ the thing to say to your newly reacquainted friend and kind of your ex, you currently have kinda pinned under yourself.

(Really, she should have seen this one coming.)

She clears her throat, releasing Nico from her grip and scooting a bit away from her.

Nico speaks just as Karolina is contemplating throwing herself off said staircase. “I have other types too.”

“Uhm?”

“I don’t _only_ like Alison.”

“Right,” Karolina’s smile feels forced, it actually hurts a little, so she drops it and steers the conversation in the only other direction she can think off on two feet, “You also like vampires’ lookalikes.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Topher,” she shrugs rubbing at her neck, “I don’t know. Julie said it.”

“Sure. So, Julie?” Nico asks, with the same pained smile that had been painted on Karolina’s face when she had asked about Alison.

She wonders what the hell kind of game they’re playing.

“Yeah.”

“How’s that going?”

She weaves her fingers together, shrugging her shoulders. “I… I like her, she’s nice.”

Nico pulls a face at that. Karolina doesn’t like that particular face all that much. “What?”

“Nice,” Nico scrunches up her nose again, “That’s not really how you describe a girlfriend, is all.”

Karolina looks away from Nico, opting for light-hearted and not bitter. “How would you know? You just got your first one.” 

“We aren’t-- it was just one-- that’s not the point,” Nico finally stutters out.

“I like her. She’s… there’s no baggage with her, no history.”

“Not like with Xavin,” Nico says, and Karolina can hear the words she’s also not saying. The words they’re both not saying.

(Not like with Nico.)

And since Karolina is now for some reason trying her hand at not hiding, she shares with Nico what she had never shared with anyone but herself. 

“With Xavin, I felt like I finally belonged. But we were too anchored to our past to look at a future,” she says, and her therapist thinks so too, so she even has like some sort of professional validation about it.

“You don’t want something like that? Someone who knows everything about you?”

(Xavin had been her home. Nico has always been a constant.)

It dawns on Karolina all of the sudden, how this probably wasn’t a conversation to have with someone who could be classified as an ex.

Oh well, in for a penny in for a pound, right?

“I don’t know. It sounds a little terrifying, to be honest.”

Nico nods slightly as if she agreed.

“But we’re good?” Nico asks, offering her hand.

Karolina takes it.

“We’re good.”

**

“Chase told me he likes me,” are the words with which Gert decides to make her debut with into her room.

Which would have been an unexpected piece of news- but not surprising, if she were to be honest- at any other time of the day in which Karolina wasn’t half-naked in her room after coming back from her morning run.

“Gert!”

“Nothing I haven’t seen before, Dean,” Gert says, before amending her previous statement with an, “Actually, I think he said he loved me.”

Now, that’s a little more shocking if not just as unexpected. She throws on a shirt and faces her again. “What?”

“I know!” Gert throws her arms into the air like she was in a gospel choir.

“Wait, why are we freaking out about this?”

Gert does her best impression of a gospel soloist again. “I don’t know!”

Karolina pinches the bridge of her nose. “You know that thing you always tell me about being rational?”

“How can I be rational when the prettiest guy, the only guy I’ve ever been into, comes to my room in the middle of the day and declares his love for me out of the blue?”

Karolina opens her mouths, then closes it.

“Present tense,” Gert clarifies like there is any need for _that_ out of all the words said in that sentence.

“I-- okay, back up,” she holds up her hands, “What did you say to him?”

“I didn’t know what to say! I just… walked away.”

Now Karolina is the one mimicking a gospel soloist. “You walked away? Out of your own room?!”

“Don’t yell at me!”

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry,” Karolina lowers her voice into a disbelieving hiss, “You walked away?”

Gert collapses on Karolina’s messy bed, burying her head into the mattress, her voice coming out muffled. “I know! It was bad, wasn’t it?”

“Uh,” she doesn’t have it in her to lie, “Pretty bad, yes.”

Gert turns around, now burying her head into her forearm. “I don’t know what I was meant to do! But. But that isn't even the worse thing.”

“There’s more?"

“Victor told me he likes me too,” Gert mumbles through her skin, “A week ago.”

“What!"

“I know! Where were all these offers while I was painfully single in high school?” Gert throws the last comment out like an arrow, or maybe like a boomerang, because it was only ever meant to hit herself.

“Gert,” she chides.

“Sorry,” Gert holds up a hand, waving it in the air like a white flag, “No more self-deprecation.”

She sighs. “I need time to process this.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Wait,” Karolina frowns, placing the words together, “A week ago? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You were in the middle of Nico drama.”

Karolina resists the urge to pout. “There was no Nico drama.”

“Sure.”

“Don’t derail the conversation.”

Gert does pout, shifting on the bed and looking at Karolina with pleading, watery eyes- how does she manage that so well, Karolina doesn’t know. “Couldn’t we talk about your disaster of a love life while I decide what to do with mine?”

Karolina sighs again, but like, might as well. “Okay.”

“Really?” there’s surprise in Gert’s voice like she hadn't meant for the derailing to truly happen.

“Sure,” Karolina shrugs, “I think it’s in my duties as a best friend to stop yourself from spiralling. Even if it’s at my expense.”

“And it’s in mine to berate you for the mess you put yourself in.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We both know you don’t love Julie,” Gert says with the simplicity only detachment can bring.

Karolina can’t say anything to that, because it’s true. She likes Julie, a lot, sometimes an awful lot, but she doesn’t love her. 

She can’t.

“And yet you made things get serious anyway,” Gert continues, seemingly bolder now that Karolina hadn't contradicted her.

“I thought you wanted me to be serious about a girl for once.”

“Yeah, about Nico. Not blonde, evil twin situation.”

“Hey!” Karolina interrupts, because that stings a little, and because it feels like she should, “Still my girlfriend you’re talking about.”

Gert scoffs. “Not for long.”

“Gert!”

“Sorry. Got carried away.”

“It’s fine.”

“Anyway, you get serious with Julie and Nico disappears into the night and then proceeds to ignore you for weeks. And now she’s back.”

“With Alison,” Karolina adds, she doesn’t know if to placate Gert or her traitorous heart.

Gert waves her off. “With a rebound of her own. So, what did she say to you?”

“When?”

“On karaoke night,” Gert says, rolling her eyes like it was obvious, “What did she tell you that was so terrible?”

“Nothing. She told me nothing,” she denies, but it sounds like a lie to her own ears.

Gert catches it because of course she does. “What did you tell her?”

“Nothing,” Karolina repeats, even more off than before.

“Do you want to talk about Chase again?” Karolina asks before Gert can say anything else.

“No,” Gert grumbles, folding back into a ball on Karolina’s bed. 

Karolina winces and sweetens her voice into an apology. “Do you want to take a nap?”

“Yes,” Gert mumbles, before moving to make space on Karolina’s bed.

“Go to your own room, then,” she says as she climbs into the bed with her.

“Rude.”

Karolina laughs as she lands into Gert’s arms.

**

“I don’t want to be this wanting thing,” Gert says, much, much later, and Karolina turns in her grasp to hug her in return, “Waiting for his affections.”

“I know,” and she thinks she, like Gert, know this more than anyone.

“I’m better than this. I shouldn’t be here asking myself whether he’s thinking of me, too. I should be better.”

“It’s not a bad thing to want to be loved.”

“It is when the boy you like has never seen you, and you’re the pathetic fat nerdy girl left there on his beck and call.”

Karolina knows better than to say anything about the fat part, but she wonders whether Gert knows just how beautiful she was- inside and out- not in spite of, but _because_ of who she was. She wonders whether Gert knows Karolina had always kind of envied her for being unapologetically herself always.

She realizes that if Gert doesn’t know, well, then she’s going to tell her. Because Gert is everything and more and Karolina loves her so much it feels ridiculous.

“You are, and I’m being so, so serious, the last person I’d ever call pathetic. You’re opinionated and smart and fuck I know you don’t care for these things, but you’re also one of the prettiest girls I know.”

Gert looks away, crossing her arms while her shoulder rose up to her ears. “You have to say that, you’re my best friend.”

“Ok. No. I’m a lesbian first and your best friend second. So,” she pats her shoulder twice, “You’re a snack, deal with it.”

Gert shoves her away with a sniff, but there’s wet laughter bubbling in her throat too.

“Wouldn’t it had been better if we had fallen in love instead?” Karolina asks, wrapping her arms back around her, “Instead of pining after people that didn’t see us.”

“We would have made one hell of a couple.”

“It would have been so easy.”

Gert smiles sadly. 

“Yeah, it would have been.”

**

It’s one week later when everything goes to hell, and everything starts with a phone call waking her up in the middle of the night.

She wonders for the split second it takes her to realize that the ringing is not a dream when this has become her life. She reaches for her phone blindly, thankful of the fact Nevaeh wasn’t here to witness her falling off the bed in the attempt to do so.

“Hullo?” she croaks out when she finally untangled herself from the mess of covers now on the floor.

“Hey, Karolina,” she hears Nico slur in the phone, “I need a teeny tiny favour.”

She frowns, taking her phone off her ear to look at the unknown number flashing on the screen. “Nico? Where are you? Are you okay? Whose phone is this?”

“Campus police probably.”

Karolina wakes up fully at that. “Whose?”

“I’m at the station on campus,” Nico’s voice gets smaller, still struggling through her words, though this time it doesn’t feel like it’s because of the alcohol, “Can you come get me?”

“Yes. Sure. Stay put and give me ten. Don’t say anything to them until I get there.”

Nico’s voice is still as small as she answers. “Okay.”

“Are you okay?” Karolina asks again, concern seeping into her voice like water through cracks. Sure, it was just campus police, but it still was dangerous.

“Yeah. Better.”

“Better?” Karolina frowns, confused.

Nico doesn’t offer an explanation. “I’ll see you in ten?”

“Yes. I’m coming. Don’t worry.”

“How can I, if you’re on the job?” is the last thing Karolina hears before the phone drones out.

She grabs her jacket off the chair, checking the pockets for her car keys and her wallet. She hopes Nico had been smart enough not to antagonize the cop too much.

She calls Chase as soon as she gets in her car, her hands becoming colder against the steering wheel by the minute.

She waits to hear the first grumble before starting to talk. “Hey, your best friend is in jail, why aren’t you there with her?”

“Karolina?”

“Yes. I’m on my way to the campus police station, Nico is there, drunk and alone. Why aren’t you with her?” she repeats, trying her best not to sound angry at the fact Nico was in trouble alone.

Chase only manages to sound sleepier and more confused. “You know the way to the campus police station?”

“Yeah, I was arrested once at a peace rally on campus.”

“You? Arrested at a rally?” Chase’s voice grows in unbelief.

“Gert rubbed off on me, I guess.”

She hears embarrassed laugh on the other side of the phone and she really doesn’t have time for this. “Don’t distract me. Why aren’t you there with her?”

“I didn’t even know she was out!”

“Whatever,” she swerves around the corner and parks her car in the empty parking lot, jumping out of the car so fast she almost forgets to pull the handbrake, “I’m here. Can I bring her to yours afterwards? I don’t want to leave her alone tonight, she sounded pretty drunk.”

Chase screams his ‘no’ in her ear straight away, so loud Karolina has to move the phone away from her ear.

“Why not?!” 

“Can you just take her with you?” he pleads into the phone, and Karolina’s pretty sure he’s pouting right about now.

“Why?"

“Karolina, please. You can’t bring her here.”

“Chase,” she sighs, her head hits the headrest. It’s too late- early- for this shit.

“Please.”

She sighs again. “Alright. But you owe me one.”

She hangs up on his thanks, before entering the police station with her best girl next door smile.

“Hello. My friend called?”

“Karolina!” Nico screams, and she’s not behind actual bars or in handcuffs, so maybe her job won’t be that hard. Not the first time she has to sweet talk a pig out of a fine.

She turns to the cop with her sweetest smile, leaning on his desk. “I’m sorry if she has been any trouble, officer.”

“Oh,” the guy squeaks in his seat, “No. No problem at all.”

“So I could bring her back home?”

The guy tugs at his shirt’s collar. “I don’t--”

“I’d be grateful,” she lays it on thick, “Really grateful.”

The guy tugs at his collar even harder, his face a bright shiny red. “Yeah, yeah. I could do that.”

“Oh, thank you,” she breathes out, and it dazzles him enough Karolina knows she has to get away now.

She walks over to Nico, sighing again this time in relief when she’s back in her arms. “We’ll go then. Bye.”

Nico isn't in on the sweetening the pig program apparently, because she blows him a raspberry as they walk out of the door. Karolina more or less drags her to the car and speeds off of the scene before the guy could notice the fact they hadn't given him their names or her number.

She sighs in relief as the station disappears behind them.

“What the hell happened?” Karolina asks- shouts- as she stops at a red light, knuckles white and gripping the steering wheel.

Nico laughs. “I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure.”

“I think he got angry because I was drunk,” Nico shrugs and Karolina has to resist the urge to hit- kiss- the smug grin off Nico’s face.

She frowns when the words catch up with her. “That shouldn’t have warranted an arrest.”

“I may have called his buddy a pig.”

Karolina lets out a laugh at that despite herself, and Nico’s drunken one joins in immediately.

“Where are we going?” Nico asks, frowning at the road signs.

“Back to my dorm. I don’t want to leave you on your own,” Karolina explains, putting her blinker on, the clicking sound deafening in her ears, “You’re pretty drunk.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re pretty drunk,” she repeats.

She sees Nico’s smile from the corner of her eye, and she knows she walked right into that one. 

“You think I'm pretty.”

“Yes. No. Yes. I mean,” Karolina splutters, almost swerving in the other lane with a jerk of her arms.

“You do,” Nico slurs, tapping her on the cheek, “You think I’m _pretty_.”

“I’m driving. And you’re not going to remember this come morning.”

Nico throws herself back in her seat, crossing her arms across her chest. “Rude.”

“But true."

“What if I want to remember?” Nico asks, just as Karolina can see the outline of her dorm building, just as she thinks that maybe Karolina could make it there without falling.

“Remember what?”

“The fact you find me pretty.”

“Nico, you’re the prettiest girl I know,” and she laughs, incongruent with her words and on purpose. 

She doesn’t know what else she would have done if she had made her body move like it wanted to.

“Oh.”

That seems to shut Nico up for a bit, just long enough for Karolina to park the car and shut the engine. 

“Prettier than Julie?”

And Nico will _never_ remember this come morning, so she tells the truth. “Yes.”

“Oh. But she’s your girlfriend.”

“I know,” Karolina swallows and change subjects before Nico can continue that conversation much longer, “Do you want to shower?”

“Together?” Nico frowns adorably and Karolina barely has the time to think that before panic kicks in.

“No! On your own! You stink a bit.”

“Oh. Yeah, okay.”

“Okay.”

She gives Nico her shampoo, a towel, and one of Karolina’s pyjamas and sends her into the communal showers, waiting outside of the room and trying not to think about Nico, just a few feet away and naked.

She really tries not to think about the naked part.

When Nico comes out, she smells like Karolina, drowning in Karolina’s old sweatshirt.

She really tries not to think about that, too.

Nico gets sleepier with each step, leaning more and more into her as they walked back to Karolina’s room.

“Thank God Nevaeh is out of town,” she sighs as she more or less carries Nico to her bed, “She’d never let me live this down.”

Nico nuzzles Karolina’s shoulder in apparent agreement. “I like Nevaeh, she’s nice.”

“I like her too,” Karolina confirms, helping Nico to slip under the covers, Nico looks on the brim of tears as she does, “Are you okay?”

Nico shrugs her shoulders, and she’s really a sight to behold, hair still kind of wet and engulfed in Karolina’s too big sweater.

“Want to talk about it?” she asks, “Why you were so drunk?”

“What’s there to say?”

Karolina pulls the covers over her, tucking her in. “You know I'm here for you.”

“Just not--”

“Just not?”

“I think I made a mistake,” Nico breathes out, and Karolina has the weirdest sense of deja vu, “I think I made the worst mistake of my life.”

“Tragic much?” Karolina brushes her black hair out of her face, love spreading from her fingers without her noticing, “You only got arrested for being drunk in public.”

“Not that. No,” Nico sighs again, curling into the covers and into Karolina’s touch, “I should have followed you. You were always…”

“I was always what?” she asks, but Nico doesn’t continue. 

She turns to her slowly, carefully, hoping to find Nico’s eyes wide and focused on her, hoping for something still, even if she shouldn’t want to. But she turns to her and she finds her with her eyes closed. 

A blessing, maybe.

Karolina sighs, and pulls one of the pillows off the bed, laying it on the floor.

“I thought it would be easier,” she confesses to the darkness, “Loving someone after loving you. I did love Xavin, I did, but. And then Julie. I thought it would be easier loving someone so different from you.”

The darkness doesn’t answer back.

Karolina feels like crying, or maybe laughing, or maybe both at once.

“It’s not easier. It only makes it all so,” she sighs, the silence sighing back, “So glaringly obvious she’s not you.”

Karolina covers her face with her elbow. 

What was she doing?

Sleep doesn’t come until the first rays of sunshine start to filter through the blinds. Dreams, thankfully, don’t come at all.

**

When Karolina wakes up it’s late, the sun now fully streaming through the blinds and casting shadows all around her like a carousel.

Not on Nico, though.

Karolina’s not fully sure how she keeps breathing when she sees the light bouncing around Nico’s face, the stray black hair streaking across her face, the black lipstick smudges persistent around her lips. 

She’s not sure she does keep breathing, actually. Maybe dead, maybe dreaming.

She tears her gaze away.

She doesn’t think she would like it if Nico were to watch her as she slept. She doesn’t think she would like another person looking at her when she wasn’t conscious of what she was doing, who she was being.

She’s saved from thinking about it much more as someone knocks on the door. 

Loudly. 

She curses and trips her way to the door grabbing a hoodie from the floor as she went. She turns to Nico, still asleep- still beautiful- before opening it. She finds her girlfriend’s smiling face waiting for her.

Karolina feels ashamed when she realizes she hadn't thought of her once since she’d seen her last, certainly didn’t think of her last night as she drove off in the middle of the night to retrieve Nico from the police station.

(Didn’t think of her as she confessed her love once again to a night that will not answer.)

She’s a bad girlfriend.

“Hey, babe.”

“Hi,” Karolina whispers, pecking her girlfriend’s lips.

“Why are we whispering? Is Nevaeh still asleep?”

“ _Nico’s_ still asleep,” she corrects, slipping outside with Julie and carefully closing the door behind herself, “Nevaeh is out of town for the weekend, I thought I told you that.”

Julie’s face pulls into a frown. “Nico’s here?”

“Yeah,” Karolina rests her head against the closed door, “She called me last night.”

“She called you.”

“Yeah, get this. She got arrested.”

“And she called you,” Julie repeats, a broken record.

Karolina furrows her brows. “Yeah?”

“Not her best friend. Or Victor. Or Gert. Or Molly. You,” Julie says, her face darkening with each name.

She pushes off the door, feet creaking on the wood. “Okay, why are you angry?”

“I’m not. I’m just asking.”

“No, you’re not ‘just asking’,” she air quotes, “What’s the problem?”

“The problem?”

“I can fix it. Let me fix it.”

And Karolina wasn’t stupid, she knew something was off between them, but she didn’t think it had been quite so bad.

(It doesn’t happen like Karolina thought it would.)

“You can’t _fix_ everything, Karolina!”

(She wonders if it happens like Julie thought it would.)

“Okay, why does everyone keep saying that?”

“Did Xavin tell you that?”

“Okay, what? Why are you bringing them up now?”

“Why do I know nothing about your exes, Karolina? Between Nico and Xavin, our relationship is a ghost house.”

“I don’t want to talk about Xavin.”

“Tell me what you want to talk about, then. Tell me what I can touch!” Julie yells in a hiss, face contorted in an expression of anguish and rage that Karolina had never witnessed from her before, “You won’t talk about your past with me, and it was fine, it was. As long as it wasn’t coming knocking at your door at 2 a.m.”

Some part of her wants to scream, because how many fights had she already had about Nico with a significant other? How many more will she have because Karolina is fundamentally unable to let go of Nico?

“What was is supposed to do? Leave her there?”

Julie snaps like a coiled string. “Don’t make me into the villain, Karolina.”

“I’m not!”

“Then don’t treat me like I’m stupid. I see how she looks at you.”

That was not the insinuation Karolina thought Julie would make. “What?”

“Does she know what happened with Xavin?” Julie trails on like Karolina had never spoken, like the question she was asking was very important, like Karolina had any idea what they were fighting about now.

“I-- yeah, she does,” Karolina frowns, more than a little caught off guard by the sudden change of subject.

“Did you tell her?” Julie insists, hands waving in the air.

“Yes.”

Julie scoffs, clicking her tongue and looking away from Karolina. “Of course you did.”

“What has that to do with anything?”

“I’m tired of not knowing who I’m dating!”

And now Karolina really wants to scream. She thought she’d have been better at love after Xavin. She thought she’d finally…

“You know me.”

And Julie does. A version of her, at least. The version that wasn’t messy and still heartbroken over a girl she had never even dated but confident and flirty, a version that didn’t lose Xavin, a version that wasn’t left time and time again by the people she loved. 

She thought the problem was that Karolina has only ever been good at being loved from a distance.

“Do I? Or do I just know some front you put out there?”

But apparently, she isn't even good at doing that.

“Julie… I don’t want to do this with you,” she says, because she doesn’t know how to say _I don’t think I want to know how to do this anymore_ , and she doesn’t know what to do with that particular thought.

(Another one for the pile.)

Julie seems to guess very closely to what she means, though, because she scoffs a humourless laugh. “Sometimes I think you just don’t want to do this at all. You feel so far away from me.”

“I like you Julie--”

“I like you too, K, so much I thought I could ignore all the other problems, keep pretending everything was fine but-- I can’t do this anymore.” 

“Julie…” she whispers because she doesn’t know how to deny the shitty job she’s been doing as a girlfriend lately.

“Let’s not kid ourselves, I know I’m not the one you fell for.”

Karolina doesn’t know how to deny that either.

“I asked you if I had to worry about her.”

“There’s nothing between me and Nico.”

“Maybe, but you still wish there was,” Julie says, and Karolina doesn’t know how to deny that explicit of a callout, “You watch her always. As if you’re worried she won’t be there when you look next.”

“I don’t do that.”

“You do,” Julie says, and she sounds so defeated it breaks her heart- she didn’t want this, she never _wanted_ this, “And I can’t do this anymore, Karolina.”

“Just because I didn’t tell you about one of my exes? Or because you found Nico in here and you’re jumping to conclusions? I told you, I’m committed to you.”

Julie shakes her head, taking step after step away from Karolina’s arms. “That’s not as romantic as you think it is. We don’t work, Karolina, and you won’t try and make it work. I can’t be with someone who’s in love with someone else.”

“Julie. Please.”

“Goodbye, Karolina. I’ll see you around.”

She doesn’t watch Julie walk away; her eyes trained on the floor instead. She grips her bicep with her hand, squeezing tight.

Maybe she wasn’t exactly in love with Julie, but it still hurts, the feeling in her chest that tells her she wasn’t enough once again. It’s not a new feeling, but it stings all the same, like the phantom pain of a faded scar.

She wants a cigarette.

She wants to run.

She can picture it, too, the muddy ground clinging to her shoes, making each step harder and harder, her breath failing her on the big hill, the last one.

(Why does she always want to run?)

She rubs the ache out of her face and does neither of those things. She goes to the communal kitchen one floor down, instead.

She cooks Nico breakfast, eggs and bacon stolen from Gert’s labelled pack- because she’s vegan and Gert owed her anyway because she had half a mind why Chase couldn’t have Nico over last night- and it’s a little burnt, but it still should taste fine.

She had almost forgotten how to cook scrambled eggs. How weird was that?

She shrugs it all off, knocking on her dorm room’s door with one hand, the other holding the plate.

“How’s the convicted felon feeling?”

Nico groans in answer, turning away from the sun streaking through on her face. “No.”

“C’ mon, I brought you breakfast.”

The change in behaviour is instantaneous, Nico turning towards her, eyes wide open. She sits up and steals the plate out of Karolina’s hands.

“Oh my God, I love you.”

Karolina ignores the stupid skip her heart does at that. “Are you talking to me or the bacon?”

“Definitely the bacon,” Nico grunts around her bite and- gross, why does she find that cute? What was wrong with her?

She shakes her head fondly.

(She guesses there was some truth to what Julie said. She did always watch Nico.)

“Hey,” Nico grabs her attention again, twirling the fork in the air, “Did I hear Julie earlier or was I dreaming?”

“Not dreaming. She went away already.”

“Why?” Nico asks frowning and fork still hanging halfway to her mouth.

“We had a fight.”

(So maybe Julie was right. Maybe Nico was in love with her, maybe she wasn’t, but Karolina still wished for her to be.)

“A small fight?”

She already knows how the story is meant to end. She’s a good friend, she likes to believe she’s a good person, too, but she knows she’s no good to love. She’s too much of a tragedy for that. 

What she needs is for Nico to stop looking at her like that, in the meanwhile. 

(Like she knows.)

Karolina sighs, sitting back on her makeshift bed on the floor. “Our first fight.”

“Oh.”

“I think it was our last, too.”

“I’m sorry,” Nico says sombre- and she looks sad for her, only Karolina doesn’t feel sad at all.

Karolina should feel sad.

Why doesn’t she feel sad?

“I thought… I don’t know. That it was going well because we weren’t fighting. With Xavin it was all so _full_. Of fights, of make-up sex, of love… I thought I was doing something right for once.”

Nico’s lips pull into a weird sort of smile. “What was the fight about?”

 _You_.

“Nothing important.”

“Well, something important,” Nico sets the plate down on the ground, before sitting beside Karolina on the blanket, “If it broke you two up.”

“I think that was a long time coming, actually, I wasn’t being exactly a good girlfriend. I think I forgot how to care about someone like that.”

“I don’t think that’s possible.”

She scoffs. “Right, bleeding heart. How could I forget?”

“Right,” Nico scoots closer and nudges her shoulder, “You could try and do better?” 

“I don’t even know if I want to.”

“Well, there’s one silver lining,” Nico leans into her conspiratorially, tapping her fingers on Karolina’s forearm.

“Yeah? What?”

“You don’t have to get her a Christmas gift.”

Karolina barks out a laugh- the first of the morning and it’s because of Nico. Yeah, Karolina can’t fault Julie for breaking up with her. “Didn’t think of it like that.”

“Of course not. You’re not _cool_ like me.”

“In your dreams, Minoru.”

That’s when Karolina becomes painfully aware of the fact that they’re touching, their thighs pressing together on the floor, shoulders to shoulders, the plate forgotten somewhere to Nico’s left. 

It’d be easy to take Nico’s hand, just as it’d be easy to move away from her heat.

Neither move and Karolina doesn’t know if it’s because Nico hadn't noticed, or it’s because if they did, they’d have to acknowledge the fact they were close in the first place. 

It makes her heart ache, the refusal to speak of this closeness she knows they both feel even if in tragically different ways.

“Karolina…”

And her name had always felt different coming from Nico’s mouth. It felt safe. It felt _hers_.

(Karolina _really_ cannot fault Julie for breaking up with her.)

“Yes?”

“I just wanted to say--”

“Yes?”

“I’m glad we became friends again. I know it didn’t happen as linearly as mine with Chase did but. But I think you’re my best friend, too.”

 _Not_ what Karolina thought she was going to say.

(Alison, Karolina reminds herself.)

“Oh.”

(Alison, Alison, Alison.)

“Yeah, you don’t have to say it back but.”

“You are, too,” she blurts out as Nico begins to pull away, “I mean, I have Gert, too. But you are.”

Nico beams up at her in a very un-Nico-ish way and Karolina can’t find it in herself to be disappointed that she hadn’t proclaimed her undying love. Nico is her best friend; she loves her for that.

“I really love you, Karo.”

“I love you, too,” she says back, and she mostly means it, she thinks, except in all the ways she doesn’t.

Because, for a second, when Nico said it, Karolina could pretend that Nico felt the same, that there was the same sort of double meaning behind her words, the same sort of intensity masked by the pretence of friendship. And it's fine if everything she's ever going to get from Nico is these three seconds of pretend. 

She's good with it.

She was the one to shoot her chances down for some stupid fear. She hardly deserves a second chance.

She rests her head on Nico’s shoulder and lets her believe the hot tears she sheds are for Julie.

**

As the weather gets colder, running becomes harder, not only because Karolina has to ditch her tank top and shorts for sweatpants and long-sleeved shirts, but also because it’s harder to block Nico’s thoughts to wander in her brain as she ran without the guilt related to her new non-single status kicking in.

She retorts to bringing her headphones along when she can and chatting with her teammates when she can’t.

But it isn't easy, not thinking about Nico, even if Karolina knows she shouldn’t. 

She doesn’t want to think of Julie as collateral damage, but it’s kind of true. It’s certainly true enough that Karolina feels guilty about it all, nevertheless. She doesn’t want Alison to get involved in this, too.

Karolina thought she was a better person, really. It seemed like Nico brought out the worst in her.

(The best, too. There are a million drawings, a million songs, to prove it.)

So, Karolina runs.

She runs until it feels like her lungs bleed and melt into her ribcage, until her legs feel like lead with each step, until she’s the only one emerging from the path and her coach pat her on the back with a smile.

“That’s a good time, Dean, don’t lazy off too much this winter break and we might get you to nationals, yet.”

She’s too busy trying to pull air back into her lungs to think of saying anything back.

Running becomes harder, but it’s still easily the simplest part of her life.

She hears a whistle from behind as she straightens out. 

“Nice going there.”

She turns to find Tyrone jogging through the finish line.

“Thought you’d never catch up, Ty.”

“Cold, Dean, real cold,” Tyrone says, smiling at her like she was ‘one of the boys’. 

It’s nice. Karolina never used to be ‘one of the boys’, before college. So she smiles back. “Only the truth, bro.”

Tyrone laughs, a full belly one that echoes in the empty field. “Like you aren’t glad I quit basketball to run with you.”

“Those guys never deserved you in the first place.”

She enjoys the way Tyrone smiles at that, slow and sweet, and he really was one of the best guys Karolina had ever met. 

“Anyway, I was thinking of grabbing a bite with Tandy, if you wanted to come.”

“And crash your date?” she teases, nudging his shoulder with hers, “You sure?”

Tyrone laughs again. “Not a date, but yeah.”

Before she can think of anything to say back, she hears her name being shouted from the bleachers and a tiny black-clad blur jogging their way.

“Hey,” she greets, when Nico is close enough she doesn’t have to shout to be heard.

“Hi.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I…” Nico’s eyes keep flying from Tyrone to Karolina, and back again, “I just wanted to take you out for lunch.”

“This the girlfriend, then?” Tyrone grins, wrapping his sweaty arm around her before she can shove him away, “She’s way out of your league.”

“Ty!” Karolina flashes him a glare because Tyrone knows who Nico is. Tyrone knows it well. 

Nico doesn’t know, though, so she stutters her way through excuses, “We’re-- She’s not my girlfriend.”

And Karolina would almost think her tone sad if she didn’t know better.

“Oh, I see,” Tyrone continues, smirk still in place, like Nico’s spluttering, had confirmed something very important to him.

Karolina rolls her eyes with a laugh. “Don’t you even try it.”

“You know I’m more into blondes anyway.”

“Oh, I know,” this time it’s Karolina that dons a smirk, “We all do. Where’s your letterman again?”

Tyrone actually blushes, the sweetheart, and Karolina laughs.

Nico coughs, shifting on her feet in place. “So, you free?”

“Yeah, Dean, you free?” Tyrone echoes and Karolina punches him away.

“Now I am.”

Nico smile is tight around the corners. “Great, do you have to shower?”

“Yeah, if I don’t want all the patrons to run away as soon as I walk in,” Karolina grabs Nico’s hand, ignores Tyrone’s grin, and leads her to the locker room.

“What’s with you and locker rooms, Dean?” Tyrone shouts after them, and she’s going to kill that boy, she really is.

“Think about your letterman, Johnson,” she shouts back, walking faster.

Nico slows down as they get to the entrance of the locker room, lingering. “What’s that thing about his letterman?”

“He gave his own to his 'not' girlfriend,” she air quotes the not, smiling when it makes Nico laugh.

“It’s a thing people used to do at his high school apparently,” Karolina keeps explaining, because it’s the safest topic of conversation they had in a while, and she wants to properly enjoy it, “They made a whole ceremony of it.”

Nico buries her hands into her hoodie’s pockets. Only then does Karolina realize it’s her own hoodie. They’re not so different, she and Tyrone, after all, aren't they? 

“Do you have it?” Nico asks, bringing her back to reality.

“His jacket?”

Nico laughs, but it’s a weird sort of laugh like she was still waiting for Karolina to answer and she needed to get to that answer as soon as she could. “Your own.”

“Yeah, bought it freshman year. I don’t use it much, though. But I like to have it.”

“Did you ever give it to Julie?” Nico looks away as she asks, eyes fixed to a spot over Karolina’s shoulder.

“No."

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” Karolina turns to the locker room’s door, “I guess it just didn’t feel right.”

She leaves Nico on the threshold, waiting, and heads into the showers, washing the sweat and heartache out of her bones.

**

She doesn’t go home for winter break.

She spends it with Nico and the others, instead, curled on Chase’s frat house’s couch, watching cliché Christmas’s movies and trying not to think about the reason why all of them couldn’t go back to any other family that wasn’t this one.

**

Karolina Dean hated frat parties.

It started to beg question _why_ she was always at a frat party as of lately.

She sighs as she avoids yet another sweaty overgrown boy, weaving through the drunken crowd to climb back into the kitchen counter with Gert. 

“Remind me why we’re here again?”

“Our friends threw the party and we have to be,” Gert says, clinking her empty beer can to Karolina’s water.

“ _Chase_ threw the party,” Karolina points out, eyes scanning the people trampling through the hallways already well on their way of being the blackout and waking up in a bathtub kind of drunk, “It’s a lot of people.”

Gert cranes her neck over the crowd, frowning. “It _is_ a lot of people. Did you see Chase anywhere?”

She shrugs, as Gert looks at her phone and then back at her. 

“He’s not answering my texts.”

“You could try to look for him, Gert. You know, with your eyes,” she deadpans as Gert’s eyes go back to being glued to her phone.

(A bit hypocritical considering Karolina’s own demons with phones earlier in the school year, but she’s sure the world will forgive her for the chance to make fun of Gert.)

Gert’s face goes through a journey that goes from annoyed to slightly impressed and then ends up on sarcastic eye roll. It’s the best thing Karolina’s seen all night.

“Cute,” Gert settles on in the end, “You’re spending too much time with Nico.”

Karolina laughs and links their arms, waving her hand at Tyrone and Tandy walking through the door. “C’ mon, it’s New Year’s Eve. I’m sure he’ll find you in time for your kiss.”

“I don’t want to kiss him.”

“Who doesn’t she want to kiss?” Tandy asks, hopping on the counter with them without splashing a drop of the contents of her red cup.

“Chase.”

Gert gasps at Karolina’s quick betrayal- and like, it’s not like it was a _secret_ in the first place, so it’s not like Karolina feels guilty about it. Not that much, at least. 

“I don’t!” Gert protests vehemently, but it sounds so defensive and untrue Karolina has to tease her some more.

“Sure, you don’t,” Karolina drawls and Tandy laughs, clinking her red cup to Karolina’s.

“Tyrone,” Gert pleads.

“Lacrosse boy is cool,” Tyrone smiles, before continuing with a pat on Gert’s shoulder, “Robot boy is cool, too, I guess.”

“Traitor.”

“What about you?” Karolina asks Tandy, who was apparently too busy staring at Tyrone to pay any attention to her, so she slaps her arm, laughing at her squeak of protest. 

Tandy scowls at her. “Not cool!”

Karolina scowls back. “Pay attention to me next time. So, who you rooting for?”

“Oh,” Tandy’s grin is the closest thing to shit-eating Karolina has ever seen, “I’m team Nico.”

Karolina splutters as Gert laughs so hard she almost falls off the counter.

“Jerk.”

“Just saying,” Tandy shrugs, “I like Hot Topic. She’s fierce.”

“Locker rooms,” Tyrone coughs into his hand, joining in on the punching below Karolina’s belt parade.

“And I’m out,” she announces, slipping off the counter.

Tandy grabs her arm trying to pull her back in. “No, come back!”

“Asshole,” she sighs, and she lets her be pulled into Tandy’s warm body, ignoring the drops of what smells like rubbing alcohol falling on her shirt as she does so.

“You love it,” Tandy singsongs in her ear and Karolina laughs despite herself.

“You’re drunk.”

“I am almost too sober, Dean,” Tandy counters, kissing her cheek sloppily, “It’s New Year’s Eve after all.”

“Gross,” she wipes the spit off, “Do that kind of stuff with your boyfriend.”

Tandy doesn’t deny it, this time, only looks at Tyrone through her lashes. The rubbing alcohol must be even stronger than Karolina had guessed. “Maybe later.”

“Gross,” she says again, fake shuddering.

That’s when she spots Nico, walking through the hallways hand in hand with a familiar blonde.

Their eyes meet across the sea of people and Karolina is paralyzed.

She shrugs Tandy off in the second it takes for Nico to disappear again into the crowd. “I’m going to go.”

“Where?” Gert follows her line of sight and winces. She catches Karolina’s arm and brings her close, lowering her voice and whispering against her cheek, “You okay?”

“Of course I am,” she answers with a grin, loud, “You know me.”

She slips out of the kitchen before Gert could have the chance to say something terribly heartfelt and untrue. She wades through the crowd, climbing the stairs to Chase's small bathroom.

She sighs as she enters, the chill of the night entering from a forgotten open window. She closes it, catching the lingering smell of smoke in the air. 

She shakes her head and grips the sink, knuckles turning white around the cold porcelain. 

She hears the door open and she sighs, cursing the moment she forgot to lock the door behind her. Only it’s not a drunken couple trying to find a place to make out in that stumbles in the small bathroom like she had expected. 

It’s Nico.

(How is it that it’s always Nico?)

“Oh,” Nico’s soft exhale almost covered by the sound of the door closing shut behind them. She swallows.

“Hey,” Karolina finds her eyes in the mirror, forcing a smile and ignoring the acid melting her guts as she says it, “Looking for Alison?”

Nico laughs like Karolina had made the best joke she had ever heard in her life, and Karolina finds herself wondering how many shots Chase and Victor had made her do while Karolina was away from the main party. 

“Sure. What about you?”

(Oh. That felt familiar.)

“What about me?”

“Nobody to kiss this year?” Nico leans against the closed door behind her, eyes never leaving Karolina’s own through the reflection. It almost feels like a game of chicken. Karolina wonders who’ll be the first to crack.

She shrugs. 

“Not really.”

Nico makes an undecipherable face at that. “Oh. Why?”

(And that’s the thing about childhood friends, they know you better than you think they do.)

Karolina concedes defeat, turning around and facing Nico the same way a soldier faced the trenches- waiting and waiting and dying with a love poem on their lips- and she supposes that in some ways, she was.

“Why what?”

She couldn’t look away, now that she could see her. 

It was unreal, how even under the low flickering light of this small bathroom in some strange house, in between white and brown tiles and way too many cigarettes’ butts on the floor, Nico looked magical- her pants so purple they looked black until the light shone on them, her black jacket folded over a darker tank top.

Karolina has to remind herself how to breathe.

“Why?” Nico asks again, her eyes not at all hazy or unfocused- not _that_ many celebratory shots then- but looking at Karolina.

No, that wasn’t quite right. Looking _through_ Karolina, like she was some frog on a high school desk and Nico was the one pulling pins through her organs, pinning her on a metal tray to study.

Karolina swallows again, and Nico’s eyes track that movement too. “Why what?”

“Why do you have nobody to kiss?”

“Nico,” she warns in a low voice because there’s nothing else to say, because she doesn’t think her throat could manage any other sound that wasn’t Nico’s name.

Nico doesn’t let her off easy, either, waiting for Karolina to answer, the silence building around them until either Karolina had to break it, or it’d break them. “You know why.”

“I really don’t.”

“Sure, you don’t,” Karolina says. She knows this song and dance already.

Karolina’s crowding her space before she realizes she’s doing so. She should stop. Nico’s body arches towards her unconsciously. She thinks it’s not on purpose, anyway.

“Karolina...” 

Nico whispers her name and every nerve end of her body lights up like it’s the Fourth of July. Karolina feels her muscles tensing, her teeth grinding together, her heart pumping adrenaline through her veins, the only thing she can do is watch Nico as her body switches in flight-or-fight mode.

(She wonders which instinct will win over, the one that tells Karolina to bolt out of there or the one that tells Karolina to run straight towards the fire.)

She hates it, the way Nico freezes her completely in place with just a glance. 

It’s unfair how she does this thing where she just completely focuses on Karolina like she somehow could see every thought that was fluttering in her brain, and Karolina could do nothing but stare back and move towards her, like a moth to a flame.

It scares her and makes her heart pounds and she wishes Nico would just slap her or laugh at her or do something to put her out of her misery.

“I’m sorry,” Karolina swallows, her tongue too big for her mouth all of the sudden, “I didn’t mean to…”

“Didn’t you?”

“I--” she stops, taking a step back, but not turning away from Nico, still watching her. Always watching her.

She’s vaguely aware of the countdown reverberating through the house.

Nico’s eyes are still on her, and Karolina makes a decision. Not the right one probably. She takes a step forward.

“I’m going to kiss you now.” 

(And this is better than hiding behind the shadow of a half-lie.)

Nico doesn’t object, or agree, to Karolina’s statement, only pushes herself up on her tiptoes and kisses her before Karolina herself can have the chance.

It feels wrong, how right it is to finally kiss Nico after so long. Then again, kissing Nico always tasted like coming home.

Her hand instinctively slip into Nico’s hair- and that’s different, too, the short ends curling around her fingers like wet ink- the other cupping Nico’s neck, leading her into a deeper kiss gently. Nico’s hands have no quibbles in exploring Karolina’s body, travelling up and down her waist, her arms, the small of her back.

The past wasn’t nearly enough.

Karolina’s nose nudges Nico’s, changing the angle, and it’s like a switch has been pulled, because Nico pushes up and kisses her something fierce, fingers carving into Karolina like she meant to break her, kissing her like nobody ever had the courage to.

Karolina pushes back, and like a tide, she steals everything that Nico lets her have- her breath, her moans, her touch- merciless in her wanting for once. Chills ripple like waves through her body. Nico’s touch burns like white salt on bare muscle and Karolina doesn’t mind it at all.

(Karolina is pretty sure she would have made a perfect thief in another life, with all this wanting left wandering around her soul.)

“Sometimes I wish I never met you at all,” she can’t help but say, the words erupting from her like a broken sob, her breath catching in her lungs.

“Why?”

“You ruined me for other people.”

Nico leaves another bruising kiss on her lips. “Likewise.”

Nico pushes her backwards until Karolina’s hips collide with the bathroom counter. Karolina smirks into the kiss, before turning them around and lifting Nico on the counter, her neck more than a little grateful for the change of angle.

“You’re so easy to love when I’m between your thighs,” Karolina whisper against Nico’s lips, enjoying the way her throat bobbed up and down at the words. She wants to kiss the spot raw. Nico trembles under her touch as she does. 

“I almost forgot what you tasted like,” Nico whispers back, making Karolina choke on a groan.

Karolina tries her best not to die then and there, fingers digging into the soft flesh of Nico’s hips, her thighs, as Nico kisses her, and kisses her, and kisses her. The only sound in the room the booming fireworks in the background and their breathy moans.

She doesn’t know by what god they manage to stumble into Nico’s unofficial room, but Karolina was not one to look too closely at blessings. 

Especially the ones she receives when she’s pushing a half-naked Nico on the bed.

**

The next day she wakes up alone in a foreign bed.

She wonders why she thought it would have been different this time.

**

She stares at the ceiling for so long, Karolina could tell you where each and every one of its cracks were. She stares for so long, that when she stops, she’s surprised not to find her world an endless white and bare slab.

She had almost expected it to be.

She takes a deep breath, finding her clothes on the floor and putting them on without bothering to make them seem presentable. She takes another as she gets out of the room. For a second, it’s like she can’t live without that white, white ceiling hanging over her head. 

It doesn’t feel real.

It feels too real.

She almost can’t stand Gert’s cheeky grin as she walks into the kitchen.

“Good morning,” Gert sips her coffee, grin temporarily obscured by her mug.

She grunts and hello back, reaching for the coffee. Gert swipes it out of her reach before she can.

“I heard someone didn’t come back to their assigned room yesterday,” Gert continues sipping her coffee with her other hand.

“Was that someone you?” she quips, managing to steal the jug back.

“Maybe,” Gert laughs, self-satisfied and happy, and that pulls a small smile at the corner of Karolina’s mouth despite everything. “But so did you.”

“Nothing happened,” she lies before Gert can go on with her interrogation.

“So I didn’t see you walking out of Nico’s kind of room?”

“No. Shouldn’t you be worried Nico has a permanent kind of room at your boyfriend’s frat house?” she tries to deflect- badly, she knows, by the way Gert only lifts an eyebrow.

“Not my boyfriend and not a concern. So I also didn’t see the two of you walk _into_ that room yesterday looking quite busy?”

Karolina doesn’t say anything. Gert just stares at her- into her, through her- until she cracks wide open.

“It was a friendly kiss.”

“Friends kiss now? Well then come on,” Gert laughs sharply and puckers her lips up in a way Karolina would really like never to have to see up close ever, ever again, “I know you’ve always wondered.”

“Gert!” she evades Gert’s grabby hands, walking around her and out of range.

Gert laughs again- cackles, really. “C’ mon, Karolina it’s a _friendly_ kiss. Whatever could go wrong?”

“Can you please stop? You’ve proved your point.”

“So, no kiss?”

“Gert.”

“There's nothing wrong with it,” Gert’s voice drops into one that is kinder than Karolina deserves, “Nobody's going to fault you for falling in love with your best friend.”

“I'm not in love with you,” Karolina says quickly. 

Deflecting comes too easily to her lips as of lately, she thinks.

Gert just looks at her. “Karolina.”

“It's being a cliché I mind, really.”

“Karolina.”

A lifted eyebrow and Karolina sags against the counter. “What do you want me to say, Gert?”

Gert smiles like she knows more than Karolina ever will- which is probably true, but it’s still rude. “C’ mon we never have girl talk.”

“For a reason. And she’s with Alison anyway. I think.”

“And yet, she kissed you on New Year’s Eve.”

“It was a--”

“Friendly kiss. Sure.”

She ignores that. She ignores the tears that threaten to fall from her eyes, too. 

“And she was gone.”

“What?”

Don’t cry.

“She was gone. When I woke up in the morning,” Karolina tries to explain, words failing her like always- _don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry_ \- “She was gone.”

She never told the full story of that summer to Gert, she didn’t have the strength to do that, but Gert guesses the ending instantly right at this moment, Karolina knows. She can see it in her eyes.

Don’t. Cry.

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” Karolina wills herself to smile, to soften the blow on Gert- and herself a bit, too. It doesn’t work. She sighs and shakes her head, “Oh.”

“Karolina.”

“There’s nothing else to say, Gert.”

“There could be,” Gert whispers, kind and cruel all at once, “Nico… she’s different when she’s around you. Softer.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“I’m serious,” Gert insist, her hand resting on her own. 

It’s warm, and Karolina feels so cold. “I know you are.”

“You should tell her.”

“Maybe.”

“Karolina.”

She sighs one last time, throwing her long gone cold coffee into the sink with a jerk of her hand. “Sorry. Just wondering how long I’ll keep living in a fucking ghost house.”

“Everyone talks to their ghosts,” Gert says, and Karolina is reminded- wise beyond her years- and a smile pulls at her lips, “The problems start when the ghosts talk back.”

Wise beyond her years or not, Gert’s still wrong about that.

“No,” she shakes her head, watching the water flow into the faucet, how it dripped and dripped until it dropped.

Gert tilts her head. “No?”

“The problems start when you begin _listening_ to them.”

“Karolina.”

Karolina puts the cup in the sink, turns the tap off.

“I’ll see you later, Gert.”

(She doesn’t cry.)

**

She doesn’t speak to Gert about Nico.

She doesn’t speak to _Nico_ about Nico.

Not that she speaks to many people in general, she’s too busy, she tells herself. 

There are meets and classes. There are girls at parties that believe she’s just another jock with a scholarship and a pair of abs- Karolina dances with them and lets them believe she is just that. There’s her heart, kept safe from any of them.

But there’s classes, mostly. Classes she follows, classes she doesn’t, homework she doesn’t like and homework she doesn’t understand. 

One day, her biology professor gives leave to class forty minutes before he’s supposed to. And Karolina knows by the way she’s a little too glad about it, that maybe it was time to make some choices about her future. 

Nico may have been a wrecking ball in her life for the last few months, but she had also made many points. She had to decide whether she wanted to make a smart choice or the one she actually wants.

Somehow it feels like she means more than just finally switching majors.

Decisions shouldn’t feel so daunting at nineteen, and yet.

She flashes a quick text to Gert as she leaves the bio building. She doesn’t even know why she does it, but some part of her guesses it was a mistake the second she does it. She wonders why.

She jogs a bit to get across campus, hoping that was enough of a warmup she didn’t have to actually warm up, hoping she didn’t fuck up her legs in her laziness.

She doesn’t expect other people to be there, but she hears muffled voices the moment the cold air of the locker room hit her. The door is left ajar, the voices clearer as she gets closer. She frowns, hand hesitating on the handle when she realizes she knows these voices.

“You hang with someone who's always lived in a gilded cage, hand them freedom without them ever having to ask, and then you're surprised when they fall in love with you,” she hears Gert say to Nico, in that chiding tone she uses way too often for a girl of only eighteen- the youngest in her year and the sharpest, and most often forgot the first part.

She almost gasps out loud, when the words hit her, her hand flying to her mouth.

And she knows, she _knows_ the words weren’t meant to cut, that Gert probably doesn’t even know she's overhearing their conversation.

(There’s a weird bell setting off in the back of her brain, though.)

Still, the way her best friend- they argued more than talked and were always a second short from physical violence, but her best friend nonetheless- would read her like that, psychoanalyse her feelings like that... it hurts.

Plus, the fact she just totally outed her feelings to the recipient of those feelings, _and_ before she even had the chance to tell Nico herself.

(Besides she's a firm believer in uttered love confessions, words that were meant to be spoken in private, soft and loving, not thrown out into the sky by meddling best friends.)

(Not that she would have ever said anything.)

And Nico is quiet.

And Karolina doesn’t want to wait for an answer.

So she backs down the hallway carefully and then steps forward again, making as much noise as possible to announce her presence, because she doesn’t know if she could stand to hear Nico's answer.

(It’d be the first time she would hear Nico’s voice after a month.)

Both Gert and Nico are turned towards her when she steps into the locker room.

“Hey,” she greets them, a slight smile on her lips like she just hadn’t had her whole life torn open in front of the girl she used to love- still loved, despite herself.

“Hi,” Nico greets back with a twitch of her hand that might categorize as a wave if Karolina was being clement. 

Awfully neutral for someone who just heard a declaration of love spoken to them- even though the unlikely emissary that is Gert Yorkes. Awfully neutral for someone who hasn’t seen Karolina in almost a month after fucking her on New Year’s Eve and disappearing the next morning.

(Seen isn't the right verb, actually. Nico had more or less ignored her for the past month, and Karolina is done softening the blow of this reality.)

(She doesn't understand why she was softening it in the first place, anyway.)

Gert stays quiet, barely glancing her way as she slips past her. When she does, Karolina notices how she doesn’t quite meet her eye, and good. About time she felt some shame.

They're really not selling the ‘we were not just talking about you before you walked in’ look. Like at all. Karolina almost scoffs.

“My last class ended early,” she continues, though, as nothing was out of the ordinary, as if there wasn’t an anger burning through her veins that threatened to slosh out with each step she took towards them.

Why the fuck were they in the locker rooms for this?

She watches Gert from the corner of her eye, the way there was a spark in her eyes, and she had known her class had ended early, and she had known Karolina wanted to run, and she had known how long it’d take her to get here from across campus.

Angry summoned up Karolina’s feelings well.

“I can see that.”

“Thought I could slip for some seven miles practice unnoticed.”

“We won't be the one to rat you out,” Gert suddenly joins the conversation, seemingly coming back to life with a jolt.

“God forbid you say anything to people you shouldn’t,” Karolina mutters under her breath.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she says before punching in her locker combination with maybe more force than was required. 

Yeah, angry summoned them up pretty well.

She starts stripping, shoving her hoodie and t-shirt in her locker without much care. 

She’s grabbing her tank top when she realizes she just stripped down to her sports bra in front of Nico. She shoves her uniform on before facing Nico and Gert, and really, kudos to her that she managed to make this all so much more awkward.

She quickly grabs her water bottle from her locker, turning away from this mess of a situation. “So… I’ll be going.”

She’s halfway to her favourite trail when she hears the soft thuds of Nico’s steps. “Wait! Karolina!”

She hates the hopeful flutter her heart makes as she turns to Nico. Nico, who looks like she doesn’t herself know why she had stopped Karolina. 

She waits, as Nico shifts her weight and stays quiet in front of her, not really meeting her eye.

“You needed something?” she asks when Nico doesn’t seem to have nothing more to say.

“I-- yes. I wanted to ask…”

Karolina waits on bated breath for her to continues, and it’s weird how easy it is to hope in that moment, that maybe Gert’s words had done something good for once, even if she sincerely doubts it.

“Yeah?"

Nico shakes her head, eyes trained on the ground. “It was nothing, don’t worry about it. Have a nice run.”

“Yes. Sure. I’ll see you later?” she offers, even if she doesn’t know why. 

She doesn’t know why she does, but it makes Nico look at her again before her eyes settle on a pot over Karolina’s shoulder- still looking but not quite.

Nico smiles once more like she swallowed glass, before saluting Karolina with an awkward twist of her fingers. “And I, you-- I. Will see you. Bye.”

She watches as Nico practically skips her way out of the field, moving in short but mechanical steps, and Karolina is left wondering what the hell had just happened.

**

Her surroundings blurry as she runs, greens and browns and blacks.

And it always got a little bit easier to breathe when her world was blurry with motion.

Not this time.

**

She doesn’t expect for Nico to turn up at her dorm room the next day, holding flowers.

She finds her on her bed again, though this time Nevaeh was nowhere to be seen- and it all feels familiar, and it all feels foreign, like a recurring dream. Actually, that was pretty close to who Nico seemed to be to her. 

(She didn’t dream the orange flowers in her hands, though.)

(Why was she holding flowers?)

She shakes her head. 

She doesn’t want to fall for this again. 

Not so soon. 

(Maybe in three years’ time, though.)

“Nevaeh opened the door for me. She had to run, though,” Nico answers the question Karolina’s brain hadn't even thought to supply to her lips.

And Karolina should be angry, but she discovers she’s only bone-tired- and excited, despite it all, despite herself, to see Nico.

“Breakfast?” she offers like an olive branch because if she’s going to do this, she’s going to do this on her own terms.

Nico smiles, a tight, weird and small smile, but it was still a smile. Karolina had missed it; she had missed her. “Yeah.”

Nico holds onto the flowers like an anchor. Karolina doesn’t ask for them and Nico brings them out with them, the only touch of colour on her. Nico always looked like nothing could touch her.

“Do you want to walk?” Karolina asks, her throat already tightening at the thought of being confined in her car for a whole twenty minutes ride to their brunch place- their. Hers. She shakes her head. 

Focus.

“Yeah.”

“Is that the only word you know how to say?”

“Yeah,” Nico says again, and Karolina could bet there would be a smirk on her lips if Nico turned towards her now.

Karolina huffs a laugh, despite herself.

“So I--” she starts, voice tentative and unsure. 

At the same time, Nico opens her mouth. “What I--” 

Karolina stops. Nico looks at her. Time slows down.

The spell is broken the moment Nico awkwardly laughs, rubbing her neck with her hand. “You first.”

“Sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. We’re friends, aren’t we?” Karolina asks, swallowing the weird lump in her throat that expects for Nico to shake her head, “Even if things have been weird lately.”

Understatement of the century.

“Best friends,” Nico nods, her hands going to her side like she wanted to hide the flowers in her hands.

Karolina ignores it.

“Okay so, as a best friend, I missed you.”

“As a best friend, I missed you, too…” Nico trails off, a sad sort of smile on her lips, “I never had to before.”

Karolina flinches at her words without meaning to, her steps faltering for a second like the words had been a bullet tearing through her flesh. 

“You don’t have to be so cruel about it.”

Nico’s hand flies to Karolina’s arm, her touch burning her through the layers of her jacket. She doesn’t shake it off. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean-- I have all these words I want to say to you in my head, then every time I try to tell you anything I fuck it up.”

“I decided to change my major to undeclared,” Karolina says because she doesn’t think she’s strong enough to hear what Nico wanted to say. 

No. 

She couldn't afford to hear what Nico has to say.

“What?”

“You were right. I wasn’t happy,” Karolina shrugs, putting her hands into her jean’s back pockets, “I made a choice I didn’t want to make because I thought it was the one I was supposed to want.”

Nico opens her mouth, once, twice, before closing it again.

“I don’t know. I figured I should go after the things I want.”

“Will you stop running too?” and it feels like Nico is asking her something more, something that had too many meanings and too few all at once.

“No. I like cross country.”

Nico shakes her head, her dark hair curling around her chin before she bats it away. “The things you want?”

Karolina misses a step and stops. Nico stops with her. 

(No, she had missed a step the moment she had said it.)

“All the things you want?” Nico continues, rushing through the words that make Karolina’s heart beat too loud. She feels like all the eyes on the busy street are stuck on them.

“I don’t--”

Nico’s eyes are as unforgiving as they are true. “Do you want me, too?”

“Nico,” she hisses, feeling all of the sudden, like maybe taking her car would have been better.

“Did you want me to stay?”

Karolina grabs Nico’s hand and drags her into the closest alley she can find. She can’t have this conversation out in the open. She can’t have all those eyes on her while Nico broke her heart again.

“Did you want me to stay?” Nico asked again, the shadows dancing around her face making deciphering her emotion an impossible task.

“That’s… that doesn’t matter,” Karolina backs away until her back hits the alley’s brick wall, “You wanted to leave. You left.”

“Do you want me to stay?”

“Nico.”

“I know I don’t deserve to ask you that,” Nico says, hands clutching the flowers so tightly one or two of them bruise darker, petals falling down.

Karolina gasps for air. “Did you-- do you want to?”

“I’d stay beside you for the rest of my life if you’d let me,” Nico says, her obsidian eyes pinning her in place, making everything so much harder.

Karolina’s chest feels tighter and tighter the longer Nico looks at her like that.

And why is it so hard to ask for Nico to stay?

And Karolina wishes this was a movie, that she’d take a breath and say the right thing and the music would swell and she’d kiss Nico as everything fades to black. But it’s not a movie, and there’s no script Karolina can follow to make this into anything other than a tragedy.

“I never…” her heart stutters painfully, and Karolina almost forgets how to breathe, with Nico’s full silent attention on her, “Wanted all those girls wrapped around my finger. I never wanted anything, and it was fine, I was _fine_ until you came back around and make me want all these--”

“Then what do you want?” Nico interrupts her, fire in her eyes, and Karolina wants to burn like a phoenix, live from her ashes.

(She wants Nico to stay.) 

(She wants Nico to stay.) 

(She wants Nico to love her.)

And Karolina isn't a poet. She doesn’t think in elaborate metaphors, or big words, or lost worlds. She’s a different kind of artist, one that sees colours and shades of it. Nico had always been the best kind of gold in her eyes.

“You. I only ever wanted you.”

She watches as Nico gasps, like she hadn't expected for Karolina to just come outright and say it, like she had expected for Karolina to laugh at her. The flowers fall from Nico’s grasps, falling like feathers at their feet.

Nico takes the few steps still separating them all at once, crashing into Karolina and tilting her head to meet Karolina’s lips.

And it's not a movie. 

There's no music playing in the background- there’s some kid singing on the street, though she doesn’t think it counts, no- no perfectly coordinated lips that move in a way no first kiss ever go- even if this kiss was anything but, even if this kiss was _everything_ \- no wandering, hesitant hands holding her close.

No, the kiss is not from a movie.

It's teeth and bite instead, it's scratches from Nico's short black nails, it's panting against her mouth before diving in again, desperate to drown under Nico’s ocean.

They break apart, and everything is the same and different, like an overdeveloped photo.

“Again,” Karolina says, “I-- I want...”

Karolina doesn’t know what she’s about to say, she just knows that if Nico doesn’t kiss her anytime soon, she might just spontaneously combust. Thankfully Nico understands her, pushing up and tangling her fingers in her long hair, strands falling from the braid Karolina had twisted them in earlier.

And it feels infinite. 

It feels like… it’s like this small spark, buried deep down in her chest, finally coming to life. It’s like every other girl before Nico was nothing but stifling wet tinder, never really catching fire, never really bursting free, but Nico… Nico’s kerosene. She is a Molotov cocktail. A forest fire.

Karolina trembles under her touch, aches for her every kiss, itches to be touched.

And she’s on fire.

Nico breaks the kiss gently, before pecking Karolina’s lips tenderly, more the memory of a kiss than a kiss itself.

Karolina feels flowers bloom in her chest.

“Does that mean you’ll stay?”

She wonders how she could have gone so long, without Nico in her arms.

“Like anything could tear me away from you.”

And well, it’s not like Karolina couldn’t _not_ kiss Nico when she said stuff like that.

So, Karolina kisses her again, taking great care in properly smudging Nico’s black lipstick as much as she could. There was something satisfying in opening her eyes and seeing Nico’s mouth a mess of black and red. 

Nothing, no one could ever affect Nico’s appearance, but Karolina; oh, Karolina could.

And they should probably stop kissing in a dirty alleyway. 

And they will, probably. 

After one last kiss.

Probably.

**

She meets Gert at the library the next day, no psych books in her hands, but a thousand pamphlets shoved in her bag with her laptop. 

Art programs she could take at Pomona and others at UCLA, even one at the Art Academy in New York. Nico had helped find most of them if Karolina were to be honest, but now it was up to Karolina to choose which one she liked best.

She can’t help the smile breaking across her face at the thought of the previous day spent on Nico’s bed. Of Nico. And then of the night after that spent doing other things.

Gert watches her, her brows furrowing and her lips pouting slightly.

Karolina smile gets impossibly big, her cheeks almost hurting from the stretch, before dropping it into a serious frown and turning her attention back to her laptop.

It doesn’t take long for another smile to grace her face, as she remembers how Nico had been curled next to her when she had woken up. Karolina would burn that particular memory into her brain surgically if she could.

“Oh my God! Stop doing that. It’s disgusting,” Gert hisses across the table, her foot colliding with Karolina’s shin.

Karolina rubs at the spot with a wince. “Ow. Doing what?”

Shushes come from around them. She rolls her eyes.

“Sitting there all…” Gert continues, gesturing wildly, her hands flying around in circles, “Just stop.”

She lifts her shoulders to her ears. “What am I even doing?”

“You’re all happy and shit. I don’t know how you do it, Karo, but when you’re happy it’s like the whole world glows with you and then you put me in a good mood, and it’s just weird. Please stop.”

“I am happy,” she says.

“Not content?”

“Happy,” she confirms with a nod, her smile threatening to burst at the seams.

“So,” Gert leans over the table, pushing her laptop away, “What happened?”

Karolina’s smile turns into a teasing smirk. “Girl talk? Really? But Gert, it’s against any theory of feminism you ever followed.”

“Thankfully, the gender of the subject of this girl talk lets us survive the Bechdel test smoothly.”

Karolina laughs at that, the shushes get louder. She winces in unison with Gert.

“So?” Gert whispers after the other library dwellers have turned back around, still leaning closer than it was comfortable.

“So what?”

Gert kicks her shin again. “C’ mon!”

“Stop doing that! Okay, okay,” she leans close, too, pausing dramatically until Gert tried to kick her again, “We kissed.”

(And it feels miraculous to even say out loud.)

Gert lets out a gasp as she starts slapping her arm repeatedly, her mouth falling open in excitement.

Karolina can’t help the small laugh that escapes her lips at that. “Then we talked.”

Gert smiles in return, as Karolina smile got wider and wider.

“And then we kissed some more.”

“Okay, I don’t need that much more,” Gert interrupts, “I’m glad it worked out.”

“Yeah, me too,” Karolina sighs, resting her head on her crossed arms, hiding her smile in the crook of her elbow.

“See? It wasn’t that hard to ask Nico to be your girlfriend.”

Karolina straightens up in the second it takes for Gert’s words to be processed by her brain.

Shit.

“Karolina.”

“I--”

“Karolina!” Gert more or less shouts.

“Shh,” she hisses, putting her hand over Gert’s mouth, “I’m-- I’ll work on it.”

“You better!” Gert hisses back, lips smashed against her palm, “God, this is exhausting.”

She takes her hand back with an ugh, her nose crinkling. “What?”

“Being your best friend. You’re such a dumbass,” Gert says, taking another chance at kicking Karolina under the table.

“Hey!”

“Stop sabotaging yourself, tell Nico how you feel, and I’ll stop.”

“That’s an awful lot of clauses.”

“Deal?” Gert asks, offering her hand.

She takes it. “Deal.”

“So… Nico?”

Karolina smiles, Gert smiles back. Laughter bubbles out of her lips, Gert’s following soon after. She stifles it as best as she can with her hands, watches Gert as she tries to do the same. She ignores the million hateful stares she feels on her back.

She’s too happy to care.

(Gert’s right, though, Karolina should talk to Nico.)

**

It takes less than four days for Karolina to realize they hadn't exactly talked in the end, too distracted by Nico's lips to fulfill her resolution to do so. It takes her two more to gain the courage to actually do something about that realization.

“We should probably talk,” is how Karolina approaches the conversation, with the same subtlety of an elephant in a crystal shop.

“About what?” is Nico's answer, still bent over her work, and before Karolina could ramble herself into a grave trying to explain, she notices the smirk lingering around Nico's lips.

Two can play at that game.

Karolina spins her in her chair, forcefully and successfully pulling her away from her work.

“Do you...” Nico starts to ask only to stop dead in her tracks the moment she sees how close Karolina is.

 _Mind_ , she supposes, is how she would have finished her sentence, hadn't Karolina lent into her, pushing her knee in the spot in-between Nico's thighs, using it as leverage to pull herself down to Nico's lips stopping right before she can feel them against hers.

“You kissed _me_ , in case you forgot.”

She enjoys the way Nico’s body stills, the way her throat bobs up and down, the way her eyes are trained on Karolina’s lips. Good. About time she understood how Karolina felt. 

Nico swallows and Karolina wants to kiss her- but she won’t until Nico admits her feelings back. “Did I?”

“Yes. And now you can't ignore the fact.”

“Obviously a mistake on my part.”

“Don't be rude,” Karolina whispers, before going against her resolution and pecking her lips softly once.

When she breaks the kiss Nico chases her lips, her hand sneaking around her neck to bring her close.

“So?”

Nico turns her head, or well, tries to at least, but Karolina is already there to bring her back. “Karolina…”

Nico’s eyes stay on her, so dark and beautiful, and it’s like she had reached out into Karolina’s chest and carved out her heart to write her name on it. 

“So?”

It’s like Karolina is standing on the edge of a precipice and Nico is the one waiting for her at the bottom.

“Don’t you know, how I love you?”

It’s like flying towards her to meet her where the stars meet the moon.

“I’m selfish,” she tells her softly, and a corner of Nico’s mouth curves upwards, “I like to hear you say it.”

Nico presses her mouth to hers another time, gently and quickly. “I love you. Even if I don’t know how to do it properly.”

“I think you’re doing just fine. But I am a college dropout so what should I know?”

Karolina can’t stop her mouth from breaking open into a grin when Nico laughs.

“I love you,” Nico says again, her voice sweeter than honey and sugar and molasses, and Karolina flocks to her lips like a moth to a flame, “And you didn’t drop out, exactly. You’re just in the process of figuring out what you want.”

She’s pretty sure that if she doesn’t stop grinning like this, her face is going to get stuck. “That’s a good one, can I use that the next time someone asks? It sounds less depressing.”

“Sure. Do you perchance, maybe want to ask me anything?”

Karolina huffs, before playfully kissing Nico’s nose. “You always make me do all the work.”

Nico doesn’t rise to the banter, just looks at her until Karolina cracks at the seams, all of her wanting pouring through.

“Be my heart, Nico,” she says, she asks, she begs, pressing the words to her lips, like a sinner to a holy picture. No act of love has ever felt as sacred as kissing Nico gently in the middle of the afternoon, the sound of her frantic heart the only witness. 

Nico kisses her back until they’re both out of breath, limbs like vines on an old brick house. “Seems fair. You have so much of mine, already.”

“I love you,” Karolina says, dragging Nico’s lips up to her mouth again.

She kisses Nico until she has no more air in her lungs, and then she kisses her again, drawing her in and out of the chair, towards her bed.

“I love you,” she whispers again, as she pushes Nico on her back never straying too far.

Nico gasps against her. “I have to--”

“You,” she drags the word out, kissing her again, “Have to kiss your girlfriend.”

The smile on Nico’s face is blinding. “Girlfriend. I like the sound of that.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Nico breathes out, capturing Karolina’s lips again, “I do.”

**

“What was your deal with Tyrone the other day anyway?” Karolina asks, after the need of kissing Nico until they both fell asleep had toned down from a burning urgency to a constant, persistent buzz.

Nico turns away from her, for the first time in almost hours, and Karolina frowns. She misses her face already. She bumps her nose to the underside of Nico’s jaw. When that doesn’t prompt her to speak, she sneaks a finger to Nico’s side, tickling her.

“Okay,” Nico shoves her away with a small laugh, “Okay. I was… jealous.”

“Jealous.”

“Jealous,” Nico confirms with a nod, her lips pressing together.

“Nico. He’s a _boy._ ”

“I know that.”

“I’m a _lesbian_.”

“I know that too.”

And Karolina has to laugh at that. "Why were you weirdly fixated on his letterman, then?"

"I--" Nico hesitates, and Karolina pecks her lips in encouragement.

"C' mon. How much more embarrassing than being jealous of a boy could it be?"

"I wasn't fixated with _his_ letterman," Nico finally blurts out.

"Wait."

Nico covers her face with her hands, groaning. 

"Wait," Karolina repeats, "Did you want to have _my_ letterman?"

"No," Nico mumbles, face in her hands still, and it's too precious for Karolina to handle.

"Did you want to be my official girl? To go steady?" Karolina can't help but tease, wiggling her eyebrows even if Nico couldn't see her. 

Nico's only answer another groan.

She tries to pry Nico's hands away from her face with poor results. "Nico."

"It's embarassing."

"Do you want it, still?"

Nico doesn't answer beyond an indistinct mumble.

"What if I wanted to give it to you, then? Would that be less embarrassing?"

Nico finally pries her hands from her face. "Would you?"

"I've already gifted you my heart," Karolina says, "What is a letterman?"

Nico blushes the prettiest of pinks and Karolina kisses her. She couldn't not kiss her. Nico rests her head on Karolina's chest, and Karolina wraps her arm around her tight.

“Do you remember our first kiss?” Nico asks out of the blue, her fingers tapping against Karolina’s forearm once before curling around it. Karolina’s hand goes to cover Nico’s automatically.

"That depends," she says, and laughter threatens to bubble out of her stomach when Nico kisses the soft spot under her jaw, “Which one?”

“The roof one.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. I don’t know how you found the guts to kiss me.”

“Well, _you_ kissed me, to be fair. I just propositioned you.”

“Miss Dean.”

“Miss Minoru,” Karolina plays back, living for the way Nico’s cheeks tinge red, “I don’t know. I couldn’t help it. I never could help myself, around you.”

Nico smiles, closing her eyes. Karolina follows after her in the world of dreams.

**

Karolina wakes up to a pair of warm, soft lips to the nape of her neck.

(She stayed.)

“Morning.”

(Nico stayed.)

Karolina’s answering smile feels bigger than her face. She presses it to Nico’s skin, like a seal and wax, only to be broken by the receiver. “Morning.”

“I love you in the morning,” Nico kisses her temple next, and Karolina leans into the touch, eyes still closed.

“Only in the morning?” she whispers, her lips finding Nico’s cheek blindly.

“Especially in the morning,” Nico amends with another kiss, this time to the bridge of her nose, “You glow, in the mornings. Like sunshine, like stardust.”

Karolina opens her eyes to find Nico’s trained on her. She can taste love on the tip of her tongue. It tastes like toothpaste and morning breath and forgotten remnants of black lipstick. 

“I love you. In the morning, and in the afternoon, and in the evening.”

Nico’s nose scrunches up, but her lips curl into a pleased smile, her cheeks flushing bright pink for a second. “You always have to one-up me.”

“It’s not a competition,” Karolina lifts herself up on her forearms, kissing Nico slowly and properly, eyes closing again as she whispers against her lips, “I’m just terribly in love with you.”

Nico pushes at Karolina’s shoulder until she’s hovering over Karolina, her black hair curling and uncurling around her collarbones. If there was anything close to heaven, Karolina imagines it would look an awful lot like this.

"But if it were, I'd be winning," Karolina continues before she went on one knee and ruined everything.

Nico barks a laugh. "Smartass."

She smirks up at Nico, hoping that the tears burning through the back of her eyes aren’t as noticeable as they feel. Nico brushes her hand over her cheekbone carefully, and it’s a hope unfounded.

“Don’t cry.”

“I’m sorry,” she shakes her head, but it only makes the tears fall faster, big, warm drops against her cheeks, “They’re happy tears, I promise.”

Nico brushes one away, kisses another one, until Karolina’s cheeks are dry again. “I stayed.”

“You did,” Karolina breathes out.

“I love you.”

“You do?” and this time it sounds like a question, even if it’s one of which she already knows the answer to.

Nico nods in answer, anyway, wrapping herself around Karolina. 

“Do you think there’s a world where we get it right the first time? Where I kiss you back in the mornings?”

“I don’t know,” Karolina admits, and when she feels Nico pull away, she turns her head back towards her, “But I don’t think there’s a world where we could stay apart for long. I know there isn’t- can’t be one where I don’t love you. My body has only ever known how to love you.”

Nico looks at her then, and Karolina forgets any other thought that isn't Nico’s name. 

She kisses her.

**

Karolina will remember only later, with Nico asleep on her chest and her fingers intertwined with Karolina’s, what she had wanted to say.

There’s something poetic about Nico being her beginning and her end, even if they weren’t exactly each other’s in between.

Karolina wouldn’t have it any other way, though. 

Nico’s nose brushes against her sternum, and no, she wouldn’t have it any other way.

**Author's Note:**

> so, if youre survived this... congratulations. your prize is reading this shitty author note.
> 
> first thing first, if you were wondering what the hell was up with part time smoker karolina, that stimmed from the one time i saw a girl so pretty smoking i contemplated for a second to start myself just to ask for a smoke. so, theres that.
> 
> second, thank you for any comment and kudos, yall are the best.
> 
> third, if any of y'all wants to scream at me you can also find me on tumblr @somniatoressinespe
> 
> cheers!


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